Hollywood probably doesn’t want you to know this, but not every blockbuster designed to launch a franchise has to be viewed as the first part of a trilogy. It’s perfectly fine for a big budget genre film to tell a complete story with a beginning, middle and end, without having to rely on sequel-baiting teases and cliffhanger endings that set up second or third installments that aren’t guaranteed to happen until the box office numbers come in.
Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean was initially viewed as a standalone project, if only for the fact the swashbuckling subgenre was dead in the water due to Cutthroat Island flopping so hard in 1995 that it bankrupted an entire studio, while the theme park adaptation boasted little star power and was seen as a massive gamble on Disney’s part right up until opening weekend.
However, we’re now hearing from our sources – the same ones who told us Riri Williams would debut in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever long before it was confirmed – that the Mouse House is already hoping that Birds of Prey duo Margot Robbie and Christina Hodson’s Pirates of the Caribbean spinoff marks the beginning of a multi-film series.
That sounds awfully ambitious at such an early stage, especially when there’s been no more concrete news on the project since it was first announced. Not only that, but there’s no guarantee that audiences would even be willing to accept a new Pirates of the Caribbean movie without Johnny Depp’s involvement, so this is definitely an example of where things would be much better served taken one at a time.
