It has been a few years since the last Pirates of the Caribbean sailed into theaters, pushing on without mainstay staples Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom but expanding its cast to surround Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow with new co-stars for wild adventures. There has been rampant speculation about a fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and even a possible spinoff from the main franchise to reboot stories with Margot Robbie in the lead (somehow). You can watch all of the previous Pirates movies with your Disney+ subscription, and be sure that all of the previous films – as well as any potential ones in the Disney production pipeline – were met with this one note from the studio, “Make this shorter.”
Director Gore Verbinski poured his heart, soul, and imagination into his Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, but the first movie didn’t start out as a short. Even though Verbinski and his team were pulling inspiration from a theme park ride, the initial Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl clocked in at two hours and 23 minutes. Hefty, and they only got longer from there. The fourth movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, did reduce its run to two hours and 16 minutes, and that’s because of the note producer Jerry Bruckheimer received on all of the films. Bruckheimer told The Hollywood Reporter:
We get the same note every time: How can we cut time out of the picture? They’re all ‘too long.’ I don’t think I ever got a picture made that was ‘too short.’ Executives see so many movies, and see them over and over again, their butt hurts at a certain point.
This brings to mind the famous Roger Ebert quote about a movie and its length. The legendary film critic once wisely stated:
No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.
And that’s kind of the case with the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. They didn’t tend to overstay their welcome, and left plenty of room for spectacular set pieces, grand overacting, scenery chewing, and treasure-hunting storylines. Unless your movie has proper time to breathe, you can’t build toward a breath-taking stunt sequence like this unforgettable duel from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.
Think back to last year, when the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Top Gun: Maverick dominated box office and packed movie theaters. What are the odds that moviegoers returning to auditoriums to see that movie again and again wanted it to be shorter? If Bruckheimer accepted the note to shorten the film, maybe it’s the beach football scene that gets left on the cutting room floor, or the sequence where Maverick (Tom Cruise) runs the practice sequence himself to show the recruits it can be done. These are iconic, and they help make the movie what it was meant to be. So leave it alone, Hollywood. If it’s long, and it earns it, we’ll sit and watch!
