14 DAY TRIAL // When Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley announced that they’d made up their mind about not returning to the fourth installment in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, many fans believed this would be the end. Now, one can safely say that, though production on the film is far from over, things seem to have worked out just fine. The first pics of Johnny Depp and some of the cast members have just surfaced, NewsInFilm says.
As tradition calls, Disney made sure that “Pirates” was represented at this year’s Comic-Con. Depp himself made an appearance in full pirate gear, introduced a few teasers and talked about what fans should expect from the fourth film, which also be the one that breaks with the previous three at least in one respect: it will be shot fully in 3D. Now, fans have the first pics from the set in Hawaii: Depp with Penelope Cruz shooting a scene where they seem to be taken hostage, Geoffrey Rush in a crutch and many other pirates looking threatening. No sight yet of Ian McShane, who plays villain Blackbeard.
“Radar Online snapped these set pictures from the Hawaiian production of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Johnny Depp looks familiar in costume as Captain Jack Sparrow, but this is the first we’ve seen of Penelope Cruz in character as the ‘feisty’ daughter of the infamous Captain Blackbeard (Ian McShane). She’s also something of a love interest for Sparrow in this fourth installment as the crew searches for the Fountain of Youth. Also pictured is Geoffrey Rush, who is reprising his role as Barbossa,” NewsInFilm writes.
It’s good to see that things are finally progressing on the worldwide popular film, especially since, earlier this year, it was believed to be plagued by all kinds of problems, including financial ones. Though earlier reports said that Johnny Depp had only agreed to return to the franchise as Cpt. Sparrow after he was offered a record $38 million paycheck, Disney decided to cut extra expenses on the fourth film by downsizing wherever possible and bringing the budget down. In such hard times of recession, even scenes at high sea have been taken out of the script because they would have cost too much to shoot, it was said.
“This has meant screenwriters Ted Eliott and Terry Rossio facing the dictat to keep Johnny Depp and co on land as much as possible. Filming is taking place in Hawaii and London (rather than LA and the Caribbean) for the tax incentives. The shoot will be fifty days shorter than At Worlds End, and there will be several hundred fewer FX shots. The script has lost an expensive scene on a frozen river Thames, and a chase through the streets of London has had its schedule cut from a fortnight to under a week. ‘The hard thing is you have to make painful decisions that cut into some very entertaining sequences,’ says Bruckheimer, but concedes ‘the audience will never miss them’,” Empire Online reported at the time.
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