Where to watch Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

Trivia & production notes

• Jack Sparrow was originally conceived by screenwriter Stuart Beattie with Hugh Jackman in mind, but Johnny Depp was cast instead because Jackman was not yet well known outside Australia.
• At the first table read, Johnny Depp shocked the cast and crew by playing Jack Sparrow in an unexpectedly eccentric manner, basing the character on Keith Richards after researching 18th-century pirates.
• Disney executives were alarmed by Depp's portrayal of Jack Sparrow, with some asking if the character was drunk or gay, and Michael Eisner declared at one point that Depp was ruining the film.
• Robert De Niro turned down the role of Barbossa because he believed the film would flop like other pirate movies that came before it.
• Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio pitched a pirate film based on the Disneyland ride to studio executives in the early 1990s after finishing Aladdin, but were rejected at the time.
• Producer Jerry Bruckheimer suggested adding a supernatural curse as the film's central plot, based on the narration from the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
• Michael Eisner attempted to shut down production after the box-office failure of The Country Bears, but changed his mind when Gore Verbinski showed him the concept art that had been created.
• Gore Verbinski directed the film partly as a tribute to his childhood memories of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, which he recalled as having a scary yet funny tone.
• The subtitle The Curse of the Black Pearl was added to the script against Verbinski's protest, as he correctly noted that the Aztec gold was cursed, not the ship itself.
• Disney faced at least six plagiarism lawsuits over the first Pirates film for supposedly borrowing elements from The Secret of Monkey Island video game series and Tim Powers' novel On Stranger Tides.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.