'Chicago' Director Rob Marshall in for 'Pirates 4'?

Disney may be zeroing in on a director to replace Gore Verbinski for Pirates of the Caribbean 4 series. According to Variety, the name at the top of the list is Rob Marshall, who received an Oscar nomination for Chicago, and because of the stupidly expanded Best Picture category at the Oscars will almost certainly have another Best Picture hopeful this year with the musical, Nine. In addition to those two musicals, Marshall also replaced Steven Spielberg as the director of Memoirs of a Geisha, which looked great but was less filling. But all of them are spectacle movies, and that certainly defines Pirates. Verbinski wanted to take his money and go do other things, and it's hard to blame him. And it's hard to blame Disney for not really trying to get him back. Supposedly, the studio wants a smaller trilogy this time around in terms of budget and scope. It's going to focus almost exclusively on Captain Jack (Johnny Depp), at least for the fourth film, and Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom are out of the picture. Marshall is a safe choice rather than a daring one, the kinds of decisions that led Jerry Bruckheimer to cast Depp when he was considered box office poison in a pirate movie, a genre that for decades many had believed to be cursed. But he's a quality director, you know you're going to have something interesting to look at, and despite the spectacle of all of his movies, he's managed to keep our attention on the characters. The House of Mouse wants this to go into production next spring, and so does Depp. With Nine hitting theaters this fall as one of the very few movies that looks like a surefire multiple Oscar nominee, it's smart to look ahead a few months to see which directors will have heat and which ones can pull off a movie like this, and I think Disney and Bruckheimer have done that here.

Comments

[Lengthy Johnson]

Bloody hell!

Verbinsky did a good job om the first Pirates movie. On the two sequels he lost the plot completely, both figurateively and literally.

To replace him is a good move. To replace him with the director of the un-bloody-watchable "Chicago" is a terrible move.

What it needs is a good director of action movies with a keen eye for characters and comedy.

That limits the field quite a bit. I say Matthew Vaughn (Stardust, Layer Cake) should do it.

[Get The Big Picture]

But Matthew Vaughan has never directed a hit. This is Disney, remember.

[Lengthy Johnson]

Well, both Layer Cake and Stardust grossed twice their budget. I don't remember the advertising being very heavy on either film, either.

The way to make a hit is to find talent and giving it the tools for success.

Who better than a dry-witted Brit to bring out the full potential of Jack Sparrow?