Pirates of the Caribbean: WTF You Need to Know About This Franchise

Last Updated on August 31, 2022

Yo ho mateys! One of the most unlikely franchises to become a multi-billion dollar grossing juggernaut was indeed Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean series. Led by Johnny Depp’s iconic Jack Sparrow, the series has run five instalments (to date) and grossed an estimated 4.5 billion dollars worldwide. This is pretty incredible considering that, in 2003, the first film was seen as a huge gamble. Pirate-based swashbucklers hadn’t been popular since the days of Errol Flynn, and modern attempts to revitalize the genre, including 1983’s Nate & Hayes, Roman Polanski’s Pirates and 1995’s Cutthroat Island, were all notorious flops. Add to that the fact that Johnny Depp was going pretty far out with his “hero” Jack Sparrow, who looked much more like Keith Richards than Errol Flynn, and you had one nervous studio. However, the resulting film was an absolute smash, leading to four sequels of varying quality. Co-stars Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley would eventually depart the series, and the common wisdom is that when they left (along with director Gore Verbinski) the series never really recovered, but is that true?

In this episode of WTF You Need to Know About This Franchise (written, edited and narrated by Kier Gomes and produced by Tyler Nichols), we dig into the saga and give our picks for which Jack Sparrow adventures you should go on and which ones you can skip.