'Pirates' Sets Sail Again Next Spring for 2011 Release

There have been more headlines coming out of Comic Con than we have a right to. Now, a lot of them were designed bombshells like James Cameron's Avatar, but we're also hearing about some future productions that we didn't necessarily expect to when the event started a couple of days ago. And that brings us back to The Black Pearl. Disney's Oren Aviv told Coming Soon, "We're going to shoot Pirates 4 in April and May of next year." The plan, according to the producer, is to release it in 2011, which is gearing up to be another huge summer, surprise, surprise. Now, on the surface, I guess it's newsworthy that the sequel will shoot in about nine months, but not a major stop the presses affair. However, if Aviv and Jerry Bruckheimer stick to the plan as proposed, that is news. "It's important to get the story right and it's important to me to scale it down, because we can't get bigger," Aviv admits. I wholeheartedly agree. And not only is it hard to keep making those movie more lavish, what's the point? You've got the audience already. They don't care if it cost $20 million or $200 million so long as you have Johnny Depp, who will return as Captain Jack Sparrow for this film and maybe for two more. Aviv explains the decision to cut the budget because, "The movies have subsequently gotten bigger and bigger and very complicated and they were satisfying on so many levels obviously, but I want to kind of reboot the whole thing and bring it down to its core, its essence, just characters." OK, then, count me in. The first movie in the series was a perfect bit of summer escapism with Depp's revelatory Captain Jack. The second and third movies, by almost any standard were poorly conceived, tiresome, overly long, and less entertaining. So if Disney acknowledges where the sequels went wrong and turns the ship around, then that's great.