WARNING: Spoilers for Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales ahead.
So the latest adventure featuring Jack Sparrow is finally here and the reviews are mixed. Fans of the series likely won’t care and the film is attempting to bring back some of the feel of the original film in this fifth installment, creating a film that is sure to please in some places. But with its release, we have to ask what the future of this series might be and where it can go from here.
The original film was a fine stand-alone film that made a ton of money, prompting Disney to call for two sequels filmed back-to-back that turned the series into an epic trilogy for some reason. Much like shared universes today, the epic trilogy was the movie fad at the time and we can likely blame Lord Of The Rings for that. On Stranger Tides and the latest Pirates film mark the start of another very loose trilogy, but the post-credits scene of the latest film hints that we might be getting more pieces of the older films back for the next installment.
So the end of the film leaves all the lovely curses and horrors of the Pirates universe up in the air thanks to the actions of our heroes. Everybody is happy at the end, loves are reunited, and all things look to be grand for Jack, Elizabeth, and Will Turner.
Then a big bad walks back on the scene in the after credits moment: Davy Jones from Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End.
Jones appears as a sort of nightmare at first but it is then hinted at that the character’s appearance was real and he’s back somehow from the bottom of the ocean.
So why does this happen? One would think it has something to do with the lifting of curses at the conclusion of the film, but it also forces you to ask how Jones is even alive. Not only did his heart get stabbed at the conclusion of the third film, but he then fell into the vortex in the middle of the ocean. We could definitely be overthinking the entire Pirates storyline, especially when ghosts and other creatures are running around. And on top of that, perhaps Davy Jones has ditched his tentacled look from his original appearance and is now a normal looking guy.
Who knows, but it seems we’re already guaranteed some sort of Pirates sequel in the near future.
