It’s long, dragging, and increasingly absurd, but it’s still a single unit. As it stands, those two films largely serve as a single, extended story. Following its blockbuster success, Disney greenlit two more sequels - Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End, which were shot back-to-back and written to retroactively graft Curse of the Black Pearl onto the front of what was now a trilogy. Based loosely on the original Disneyland ride, it tells a single, coherent story that wraps up pretty conclusively. The first film, Curse of the Black Pearl, is almost entirely a standalone adventure. The entire continuity of the ‘ Pirates of the Caribbean’ franchise makes no sense That’s largely due to the series’s lurching development.

The entire continuity of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise makes no sense. The problem doesn’t lie entirely in Dead Men Tell No Tales. Warning: major spoilers ahead for all five Pirates films, including Dead Men Tell No Tales Why should fans care about the latest chapter of a story when the creators themselves don’t? Image: Disney But their impact is blunted when no one making the films cares about what these elements are supposed to mean.

Basic elements of the universe, like Jack’s compass or the Black Pearl, show up in every movie. If the whole point of a franchise (at least from a non-monetary perspective) is to give filmmakers room to tell overarching stories and develop characters and plots over time, the Pirates of the Caribbean films have utterly failed. But the complete disregard for the series’s existing canon feels significant. This may seem like the nitpicking of a fan who spent what, in retrospect, may have been too much time watching the first few Pirates movies in middle school. ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’ is puzzlingly, irritatingly ignorant of much of the continuity of the series

Pirates of the caribbean beckett