Collection Pirates of the Caribbean

Pirates of the Caribbean should not have worked. It was a film based on a theme park ride, in a genre that had been commercially dead for decades, and it became one of the highest-grossing franchises ever made.

The reason is Jack Sparrow. Johnny Depp's performance reportedly worried the studio enormously - a pirate captain who staggers, mumbles and appears to be improvising his own survival in real time. It reframed the whole film from an adventure into a comedy where the stakes stay real.

The production design carried the rest. The Black Pearl, the cursed Aztec gold, the compass that points to what you want rather than north, Davy Jones's tentacled crew rendered with effects work that still holds up twenty years later.

Hans Zimmer's theme did as much cultural work as the films, to the point where it is now simply the sound of a boat being exciting.

This collection covers pirates, ships, skulls and treasure. Why is the rum gone.