The franchise has failed to set sail once more with various abandoned sequels over the years.

While Margot Robbie has done all kinds of movies in her career, one feature audiences won’t be seeing her headlining in the near future is a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. In a recent interview, Robbie revealed that her proposed Pirates of the Caribbean spin-off that would’ve had a female-led cast was dead in the water. Given the minimal movement on it since it was announced in June 2020, it shouldn’t be a surprise that this project wasn’t going forward. After all, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has faced countless dead ends when it comes to launching certain sequels. Despite hailing from the king of endless franchising, Disney, this particular saga is notorious for sequels that have gone nowhere.

One of the Highest Grossing Movie Franchises

There are two truths to recognize about the Pirates of the Caribbean saga to understand the phenomenon of unproduced sequels in the franchise. The first is that this film series is unspeakably profitable for Disney. Over just five films, the Pirates features have grossed $4.5 billion worldwide. The fifth installment of the saga, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, was objectively a movie nobody saw or cared about, yet it still managed to rack up a gargantuan $794.8 million worldwide. Down from its predecessors, to be sure, but that sum still put this film ahead of all but 11 movies at the 2017 worldwide box office. No wonder Disney is constantly interested in continuing this franchise.

Equally true, unfortunately, is the fact that the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels are grotesquely expensive affairs to make. Shooting many of these movies on location, the costs of keeping cast members on board long-term, and just getting all those digital effects done in time for unmovable release dates keeps these budgets skyrocketing. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End cost a mighty $300 million to produce, but that was nothing compared to its successor, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. That adventure ended up costing a staggering $378 million to make, rendering it, currently, the most expensive movie in history. The Pirates movies uncover a lot of treasure for Disney, but they also have to spend a lot of doubloons to make these movies a reality.

An Endless Sea of Sequels

Initially, it looked like Dead Men Tell No Tales was putting an end to this financial juggernaut since its marketing kept emphasizing that this was the final adventure in the saga. However, a post-credits scene nonsensically teasing the return of Bill Nighy’s Davy Jones (a development Nighy didn’t know about until months after Tales was released) indicated that the franchise wasn’t done yet. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer confirmed as much in a September 2017 interview where he teased that a sixth Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t a sure thing, but that there was a lot of enthusiasm for it.

What’s Happening With the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ Reboot?

However, in 2018, a radically different direction for the franchise was explored with Deadpool screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick getting recruited to pen a script for a potential reboot of the franchise. However, the screenwriters had left the project by early 2019, though Disney wasn’t giving up on the idea of giving the Pirates of the Caribbean saga a revamp just yet. Hot off his acclaimed work on the miniseries Chernobyl, writer Craig Mazin, along with franchise veteran Ted Elliot, was hired at the end of 2019 to pen another script for a Pirates reboot.

The idea of rebooting a familiar brand name like this one was certainly appealing for Disney given the multitude of problems it had faced in trying to turn the original trilogy into an eternally ongoing series like the James Bond films or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Starting from scratch would allow them to create new characters and mythology that could be built with long-term narratives in mind. The slate of Pirates of the Caribbean sequels expanded further in 2020 when Margot Robbie’s proposed spin-off entered the conversation.

Now there were two separate productions on the table that could expand the Pirates universe even further. 2020 is also the year rampant rumors made the rounds that Disney was eyeballing Karen Gillan as a potential new lead actor for the Pirates franchise, but this was never officially confirmed. Perhaps she caught the attention of Disney executives hot off her work in Jumanji and Guardians of the Galaxy or perhaps this was the latest in an endless sea of instances where the internet globs onto a recognizable blockbuster movie actor for any potential fan casting.

Nowhere to Draw Ideas From

There was never any follow-up news on Mazin’s involvement in that Pirates reboot, though his subsequent TV project The Last of Us presumably ensured that his schedule was now much too crowded for swashbucklers. The constant dead ends for these reboots seem to indicate that the Pirates of the Caribbean movies face a unique problem in the world of modern franchises. Though they’re based on a theme park ride, almost all of their characters and mythology are original creations. That offers up exciting opportunities for fresh new storytelling, but it also means there aren’t decades of comics, novels, or TV episodes to turn to for inspiration for plotlines.

Plus, as the years go by, and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise drifts further and further into the past, there’s even less reason for Disney to invest all that money into a new installment in the saga. Pre-2012, Pirates was Disney’s only way of producing massive live-action blockbusters that spawned countless sequels. Nowadays, the Star Wars and Marvel Cinematic Universe movies have got that area covered quite thoroughly. No need to push these reboots on through, especially since none of the three major projects that have been suggested in 2018 have managed to make any sort of exciting headway.

The ‘Pirates’ Franchise Is in Limbo

And so, with the Margot Robbie spin-off shelved, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is officially in a state of limbo. No doubt someday somebody will try a legacy sequel, even though the obvious narrative route of having the child of one of the original protagonists go out on an adventure has already technically been done by Dead Men Tell No Tales. There’s too much money to be made here for the franchise to go dormant forever while Disney’s recurring interest in full-on reboots throughout 2018 and 2019 indicates that the studio is still well aware that Pirates of the Caribbean is a brand name that lures people to the movie theater, especially in those increasingly important overseas territories.

For now, though, the series is on hiatus, with Disney instead shifting its attention to other movies based on its beloved theme park attractions. The Haunted Mansion, a new take on the material divorced from the earlier Eddie Murphy movie, hits theaters in August 2023, while movies based on Space Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain, among others, are in various stages of development. Only time will tell what creative development Disney ends up going in with these features if they even get made at all. Here’s to hoping they fare better than the various failed attempts to wring further sequels out of the lucrative but waterlogged Pirates of the Caribbean saga.