'Pirates of the Caribbean' was 'doomed to fail,' according to director Gore Verbinski

In hindsight, it is crazy to call the Pirates of the Caribbean anything other than an overwhelming success and standalone in the pop culture zeitgeist, but according to its director, it was expected to fail. 

"I remember pitching it to [Hans] Zimmer and he said, 'You're mad! You're making a pirate movie? Nobody's going to see a pirate movie.' It was resoundingly, 'that's the worst idea ever,'" Gore Verbinski told Collider in a recent interview. "And there was something exciting about that. It was so doomed to fail. You’re setting out to go make a genre that literally doesn't work, or there's so much historical proof that it will not work."

To be fair, the premise was based upon the Disneyland attraction by the same name. It could have easily failed—hard. Like, Green Lantern-style. And Walt Disney Picture was keenly aware of that possibility ahead of 2003's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. 

Verbinski continued: "So, you're making everybody nervous. The studio’s nervous. Everybody's nervous about Johnny Depp's performance. Everybody's nervous about the story. It's convoluted—they’re returning the treasure, wait they've taken the treasure back, they're cursed? Everything about that had a spirit of madness to it. Then, after it was successful, Pirates 2 and 3 start to fall into the ‘release date-driven experience."  

The Curse of the Black Pearl introduced Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow and Orlando Bloom as Will Turner, a blacksmith who needs help rescuing his kidnapped lover, Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightly).