While the fifth film in Johnny Depp’s maritime money-making franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales continues shooting off the Gold Coast in Australia, it seems that an uninvited cast member tried to sneak his way onto the set. (And no, not Orlando Bloom.) Apparently, a yet-to-be identified man dressed, appropriately enough, as a pirate, pulled a knife on security staff who would not let him enter the set, leading Queensland police on a chase ending in a very un-pirate-like place. K-Mart!
According to Australia’s 9 News, sometime yesterday, a wayward wannabe swashbuckler in full pirate regalia, sporting a possibly fake parrot on his shoulder, apparently attempted a more civil entry to the set. However, he quickly resorted to an alternative method of "flicking a knife" at the security staff at the entrance. An ensuing police manhunt for the scurvy stowaway would ensue. Security cameras eventually caught the ersatz buccaneer hiding inside a changing room at a local K-Mart department store! Unfortunately, cutlasses and peg-legs were not on Blue Light Special.
As you can see in the above tweet, the police released a photo of the intended intruder showing him to be a dead-ringer for the Pirates franchise -- with his dirty looking dreadlocks and heavily shadowed makeup around the eyes. The shoulder-perched parrot may have been where went this intruder little over the top.
The incident serves to drive home the fact that security around movie sets need to be a lot tighter; especially if one random nutcase nearly managed to storm the set of a film franchise that carries nearly a $300 million budget. After all, what if something had happened to Johnny Depp? Besides never gracing the screen again as the iconic Captain Jack Sparrow, he’d never be able to give the world Mortdecai 2: The Search For An Audience!
Random set incident aside, Dead Men Tell No Tales will be looking to keep the long-running franchise -- which began in 2003 with Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl -- running on all cylinders, despite a growing number of reservations from moviegoer who might perceive this fifth film as the largest stretch, yet. However, the box-office sales figures from the last entry, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, told a different tale with its more than $1 billion global gross, which exceeded its immediate predecessor.
The plot of the new film will have Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow tangling with an enemy from his elaborate past named Captain Salazar, played by Javier Bardem. Jack will find himself having to escape from "The Devil’s Triangle," aka, The Bermuda Triangle, while searching for the mythical MacGuffin: the Trident of Poseidon.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales will look to keep the sticky-fingered skull and crossbones of the franchise sailing steadily when it is set to hit theaters on July 7, 2017.
