Disney’s eagerly awaited Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is sure to plunder plenty of booty over the weekend as it sets sail in 4,133 theaters across North America to challenge Warner Bros.’ Superman Returns for the box office title. The film’s opening promises to be even bigger than its 2003 predecessor, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which debuted to $46.6 million on its way to $654 million worldwide.
By all indications, Industrial Light & Magic does another stellar job with the effects work, which involved creating 14 CG-animated characters. One of the film’s many vfx highlights is the transformation of actor Bill Nighy into the mythical Davey Jones, portrayed in this film as a human/sea creature hybrid with a face full of tentacles and a crab’s claw for a peg leg. Other vfx houses contracted for the pic include Asylum, The Orphanage, Method Studios, Tippett Studio, Caf’ FX and Proof Inc.
In the film, Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) owes his soul to Jones and must find a way to save himself from suffering for eternity as a member of the fiend’s army of sea phantoms. Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightley return as Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann, Sparrow’s reluctant partners in swashbuckling. Even Geoffrey Rush reprises the role of the villainous Barbossa from the first movie. He and the rest of the main cast are already at work on the third installment, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which is expected to debut on May 25, 2007 (Memorial Day weekend).
Judging by the rate of presales at MovieTickets.com and Fandango.com, Pirates is on track to surpass 20th Century Fox’s X-Men: The Last Stand, which is the reigning summer champ with $230.4 million domestically. Pirates opened at midnight to packed houses and has sold out the first 24 hours of around-the-clock screenings at Disney’s El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood.
Opening in limited release today is director Richard Linklater’s animated mind bender, A Scanner Darkly. Based on the novel by sci-fi legend Philip K. Dick, the film employs the interpolated rotoscoping technique Linklater used in Waking Life to transform live-action digital video into lively animation. Keanu Reeves stars as drug enforcement agent with a split personality assigned to monitor the movements of a paranoid group of addicts sharing a home in suburban Orange County, Calif. Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson and Rory Cochrane fill out the cast. Warner Independent Pictures has released the flick in 17 theaters in select cities and will roll it out wider in the coming weeks. For more information on the making of A Scanner Darkly, pick up the August issue of Animation Magazine, available now at Barnes & Noble locations and other booksellers. Also, be sure and read this month’s editor’s note at www.animationmagazine.net/article.php?article_id=5627 for additional details and reactions to the pic.
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