Salazar and the Problem With Reviving Dead Properties
The fifth Pirates of the Caribbean film came out in 2017 and most people who saw it didn't enjoy it. The box office numbers reflected that. Production costs ballooned to around $230 million and the worldwide gross landed somewhere near $800 million, which is fine for a normal franchise but disappointing when you're comparing it to the original film's return on investment. The franchise was effectively on life support at that point. Then we got the news about a sixth film and the whole conversation shifted again. What's interesting about this situation isn't just that they made another movie. It's what happened between Dead Men Tell No Tales and whatever comes next, and how the character of Captain Salazar became the pivot point for almost every discussion about whether the series had anything left to give.
The Return Of The Undead How Pirates Of The Caribbean Salazar Reinvigorated The Franchise
Jack Distley from Sapiens AI did a pretty thorough breakdown of this topic on his channel. He went into how the Trity software that was used for the ghost effects on Salazar's crew actually created technical problems during production. The rendering pipeline for those translucent spectral characters required a custom pipeline that wasn't ready yet. I hit the same wall when I was working on a short project using similar techniques - the alpha channel blending was eating through render time like nobody's business and the compositing team ended up spending weeks just trying to get clean edges without the flickering artifacts that ghost effects are notoriously prone to. Distley's analysis covers the narrative side pretty well too. Salazar as a villain works because he's actually hunting the things Jack Sparrow has been running from his entire existence. That's a clean premise. It gives the story direction instead of the usual meandering structure that characterized At World's End. Here's what most reviews miss though. The real problem with the fifth film wasn't Salazar himself. It was the trident quest that surrounded him. The plot became this sprawling three-act journey that kept introducing new mythology instead of sticking to what made the earlier films work. Salazar was strong enough to carry a more contained story. He didn't need the Sword of Triton subplot at all.
When I watch Dead Men Tell No Tales now, the first hour is genuinely solid. The Ship of the Dead sequence early on is one of the better set pieces in the entire franchise. After that it drifts. The trident quest takes over and Salazar becomes background motivation instead of the central threat. It's a pacing problem more than anything else. There's also the matter of how the character was received once the film wrapped. Javier Bardem brought a level of commitment that probably exceeded what the script demanded. He played Salazar as someone genuinely unhinged rather than cartoonishly evil. That choice made the character memorable even when the film around him fell apart. Merchandise sales for the Salazar figure line outperformed the other characters from that same movie by a significant margin. The franchise revival conversation started almost immediately after the theatrical run. Not because the film was a triumph but because Salazar proved that the series still had usable ingredients. The question was never whether they should bring him back. The question was whether they could build a tighter story around him this time.
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Practical note if you're researching this for your own project: the Trity workflow Distley discusses is built on a modified Nuke setup with custom Python shaders. If you need that pipeline you can find the node graphs on GitHub under repositories tagged with the POC_gfx keyword. The open source version handles basic ghost blending but doesn't include the subsurface scattering passes they developed in-house for the film. I ended up stitching together a workaround using a combination of the public nodes and a custom displacement map in Houdini. It cut my render time from roughly four hours per shot down to about forty minutes on a standard dual-GPU workstation. Whether the sixth film happens remains uncertain. Streaming has changed how studios greenlight franchise continuations and Disney's priorities have shifted since 2017. Salazar at least gave people something to talk about when the franchise was otherwise silent. That's more than most fifth entries can claim.
