Most of us have already forgotten that a fifth movie in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise came out a couple months ago, but while we've been ignoring it something interesting has been happening. It's been making a lot of money. While Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales seemed to bomb pretty hard domestically, that hasn't been the case in the rest of the world. The film now sits as the fourth highest grossing movie in the world this year. You can't exactly call that a failure.
With box office receipts coming in from the weekend, Deadline is reporting that Pirates of the Caribbean 5 has broken the $700 million mark at the global box office this year. While the movie has only been able to drum up an anemic $165 million in North America, the rest of the world has seemingly embraced the latest adventure of Captain Jack Sparrow. The new Pirates film is currently the tenth highest grossing film of the year here, but it's actually the fourth highest grossing film in 2016 globally. Although, its lead over Wonder Woman has been shrinking and there's a good chance it may lose that spot shortly.
As you likely could have guessed, China has been the one leading the international charge for the franchise. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales brought in $172 million there, outdoing the North American total. In addition, the movie has brought in $37 million in Russia, and broken $20 million in the UK, France, Germany and South Korea. The international take makes Dead Men's total box office greater than that of the original entry, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.
While Pirates 5 was an expensive movie to make, with an estimated $230 million budget, a $700 million global take surely qualifies the movie as a success by any financial metric. While the film was generally panned by critics, that's never been the true definition of success by a studio. Overall one has to assume Disney is more than happy with the franchise.
Of course, with success like that, one has to wonder what, if anything, is next for the franchise. Some of the advertisements for Dead Men Tell No Tales called it the last adventure, but in later interviews directors Espen Sandberg and Joachim Rønning said they saw it more as the beginning of the last adventure, and a post-credits scene certainly set up a potential direction for another film to go. No discussion of another entry has been mentioned publicly, but with the box office becoming an increasingly global affair, one would think that Disney would be willing to back another installment assuming Johnny Depp and the rest of the cast is willing to return.
