The Host of Dailies Offers His Thoughts on At World's End.
When did it become cool to bash Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End?
“It is a miss at the box office!”
“It is too long!”
“There is no creativity on Hollywood and that is why they keep making sequels!!!”
Unreel!
Let’s start with the fact hat it made $400 million dollars internationally this weekend. At this point, it is all but sure to make money – and that’s before DVD and merchandising. The only miss might be in not buying Disney stock.
It is two hours and forty-seven minutes long. I’ll be the first one to admit I can’t stand sitting that long for anything. I remember seeing Ghandi in theaters when I was a kid…it ran for three hours and eight minutes, and I felt like I had been in the theater so long I was the one who had been fasting.
The length of At World’s End limits the number of screenings, which affects the bottom line. For a movie with a young core audience, it seems way too long for kids – especially when compared to Shrek the Third, which was just a tad more than an hour and a half.
Could it be that Jerry Bruckheimer, Gore Verbinski and the brain trust at Disney never noticed it was long?
Yeah, probably not.
So why would they make Pirates so long?
Could it be that the movie makers actually were passionate about telling the entire story? Could they possibly have wanted the audience to walk out satisfied with their billion dollar franchise?
You bet!
Lost in all of the criticism of the movie, is the fact that the people who made Pirates have actually risked at least a part of their bottom line to make the movie they wanted to make. Even if that meant it was nearly three hours long.
We should be thanking the director, the producer and the studio for actually giving us our nine dollars worth. The size of this franchise meant they could have made the movie ninety minutes and it still would have done $400 million…maybe more.
There are a lot of sequels this summer; some are long, some are long on hype. Pirates is both – and lives up to it.