Poor Rob Marshall will only have a couple of hundred million bucks to play with on Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, compared to the $300m that Gore Verbinski had to throw at the last instalment.
It's all part of a scaling back, under Disney's new chairman Rich Ross, designed to protect that all important bottom line. The LA Times blames increasing marketing costs and deteriorating DVD revenues. Ross "wants to be mean and lean and cost effective," says producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
This has meant screenwriters Ted Eliott and Terry Rossio facing the dictat to keep Johnny Depp and co on land as much as possible. Filming is taking place in Hawaii and London (rather than LA and the Caribbean) for the tax incentives. The shoot will be fifty days shorter than At Worlds End, and there will be several hundred fewer FX shots. The script has lost an expensive scene on a frozen river Thames, and a chase through the streets of London has had its schedule cut from a fortnight to under a week.
"The hard thing is you have to make painful decisions that cut into some very entertaining sequences," says Bruckheimer, but concedes "the audience will never miss them."
Gore Verbinski had some serious clashes with the studio brass over the wildly spiralling costs of At World's End, and most would agree that the bloated second sequel was not necessarily the better for them. If On Stranger Tides trades overblown spectacle for, say, a coherent screenplay, we reckon that's a decent compromise.
And it's not as if $200m is chickenfeed.
On Stranger Tides sees Johnny Depp returning as Jack Sparrow, alongside Geoffrey Rush as Hector Barbossa, Ian McShane as Blackbeard, and Penelope Cruz as Blackbeard's wayward daughter. Shooting starts in June for a 2011 summer release.