Why Pirates of the Caribbean Didn’t Inspire Any Rip-offs

Despite the Pirates of the Caribbean movies being a massive financial success, the blockbuster franchise didn’t prompt a string of rip-offs. Why not?

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The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are one of Hollywood’s most financially successful franchises ever, so why have the blockbuster hits barely inspired any rip-offs attempting to cash in on their popularity? Usually, when a movie proves unexpectedly successful, it is followed by a slew of rip-offs. Sometimes, these knock-off movies can be even better than the original, while in other cases, they are critically derided as unoriginal cash-ins. However, in every case, these movies exist because another franchise proved that the relevant sub-genre or story was a profitable one.

For example, when the Harry Potter franchise proved a success, the following years saw studios attempt to recreate this magic with a string of kids’ fantasy novel adaptations. When a paranormal YA series proved a huge hit a few years later, Twilight inspired numerous rip-offs from Red Riding Hood to I Am Number Four. However, one of the most successful franchises in cinema history has given rise to almost no knock-offs since it began almost two decades ago.

When The Curse of the Black Pearl was released in the summer of 2003, few industry commentators expected the movie to be a success. Based on the perennially popular Pirates of the Caribbean attraction in Disneyland, the action-adventure was expected to perform about as well as the same year’s The Haunted Mansion. Instead, The Curse of the Black Pearl earned a whopping $650 million, made overnight superstars of its lesser-known cast members, and even earned an Oscar nomination for Johnny Depp’s irreplaceable role as Jack Sparrow. When almost every major Hollywood blockbuster before and since the Pirates of the Caribbean series has produced a stream of knock-offs, why has the massively successful franchise inspired so few rip-offs despite its huge success? The answer is surprisingly complex and comes down to issues like initial investments, the likelihood of a repeat success, and Disney’s own struggles with historical action-adventure movies.

Pirates of the Caribbean Was An Expensive Experiment

With its lavish production design, a period setting, state-of-the-art CGI, and a cast that included sizable stars like Depp, The Curse of the Black Pearl was not an inexpensive production. As such, the franchise’s success could not be replicated on the cheap, something that proved more and more true as the budgets of Pirates of the Caribbean sequels ballooned throughout the progression of the series. Other blockbusters that led to rip-offs, from Gremlins and Top Gun to Mad Max, had historically been comparatively cheap movies that made large profits, rather than very profitable but already-expensive efforts. As such, studios were not as quick to invest the costly upfront money required to effectively recreate the appeal of a hit like The Curse of the Black Pearl, particularly when comparatively cheaper success stories like the same year’s Elf could be recreated at a low cost and were, as such, a less risky investment.

Swashbuckling Adventures Are A Risky Investment

Pirates of the Caribbean was a massive success, but director Renny Harlin’s comparable Cutthroat Island was a historically huge flop only eight years earlier. That movie also attempted to reignite audience interest in swashbuckling adventure movies and failed disastrously and, not only that but, before Cutthroat Island, there was 1986’s Pirates, another box office bomb that sank the swashbuckling sub-genre a decade earlier. While the pirate story sub-genre seemed to be largely dormant before the success of The Curse of the Black Pearl, this is proof of just how much both these massive failures were forgotten in the years after their release. The sub-genre was correctly assessed as a risky investment, meaning producers were more likely to rip off Harry Potter or another similarly lower-risk franchise despite the huge returns that the Pirates of the Caribbean movies made on their investment.

A similar issue occurred when Kevin Costner’s Mad Max-influenced Waterworld attempted to recreate the success of the earlier hit without taking into account how few post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies had succeeded since the Mel Gibson vehicle’s release. Although Mad Max was so successful that it was once the most profitable movie ever made, this success led to numerous critical failures like Rats: Night of Terror and 1989’s Slipstream, neither of which were able to recreate Mad Max’s impact. As such, producers looking at the box office receipts of The Curse of the Black Pearl were right to cast their sights a little further back and see just how poorly pirate stories tended to perform with audiences in preceding years. On that note, the studio that created the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise’s then-recent history in a similar sub-genre was also a factor.

Disney’s Pre-Pirates Track Record Didn’t Inspire Confidence

A studio looking to make a quick buck by ripping off the Pirates of the Caribbean formula needed only to look at the subpar reception of 2003’s Sinbad, 2002’s Treasure Planet, and 2001’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire to see that Disney struggled to make historical action-adventure stories appealing for years before succeeding. While copying Pirates of the Caribbean seemed like a surefire recipe for success, the company that owned the rights to the franchise proved that wasn’t true via expensive misfires like that trio of animated action adventures movies. All of them were released after the success of 1999’s The Mummy remake and none of them proved able to successfully soften its appeal for PG viewers. This meant that few movies tried to replicate the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise until Disney themselves attempted this with 2021’s Jungle Cruise.

Released nearly 20 years after The Curse of the Black Pearl, Jungle Cruise was one of the first big-budget attempts to recapture the tone of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. With a theme park inspiration, romance, action, horror elements, and broad character comedy all coalescing in a period adventure set in a faraway tropical paradise replete with supernatural threats, it was hard to deny the similarities between Jungle Cruise and Pirates of the Caribbean. However, even this attempt from the company behind the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise was far from an unqualified success story, proving that studios were right to not try cashing in on the series at the height of its popularity despite the temptation.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/pirates-caribbean-franchise-success-no-ripoffs-why-explained/