Sightlines · reception

How Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was received

2006 · Gore Verbinski · Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest on Sightlines

The arc

Critics in 2006 grumbled it was bloated and a cliffhanger-shaped half-movie, but audiences made it only the third film ever to cross $1 billion worldwide. Now it's widely reclaimed as the best Pirates sequel — and Davy Jones as maybe the greatest CGI character ever put on screen.

What’s debated

The eternal fight: is Verbinski's maximalist middle chapter secretly a blockbuster masterpiece, or the moment the franchise's plotting collapsed under its own barnacles?

Its footprint

"I've got a jar of dirt!" lives on as a meme, and Davy Jones's tentacled face — Bill Nighy under Oscar-winning ILM effects — became one of the 2000s' most referenced movie images.

Where it stands

A canon climber: the go-to exhibit whenever film Twitter argues that mid-2000s blockbusters were better than we admitted, and a Letterboxd favorite among Verbinski defenders.

Did you know? Bill Nighy played Davy Jones on set in a gray motion-capture suit with tracking markers on his face — no prosthetics at all — and ILM's fully digital creation helped win the film the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

A Deleuzian reading of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest →