Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest · reception & legacy
2006 · Gore Verbinski
How Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest has been received, argued over, and remembered.
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 favourite among Verbinski defenders.