The modern POTC series literally invented pirate dark fantasy film genre.
See, this is crazy to me. I can't believe that the Weird West genre has been around since the 1950s and yet an equivalent "weird pirates" genre wasn't created until 2003 by Disney! But I can't think of a single work prior to that which fits the description. I know Weird West isn't a huge genre, but I was able to come up with at least 50 posts for [email protected] . It's so weird for an equivalent pirate genre to have what, 5 entries? I feel like there must be more out there and I just can't find them. This isn't like, say, the creation of cyberpunk, which couldn't really be created until after computers existed; pirates and zombie stories have been around for centuries and yet they were never brought together??
Sorry, I'm not disagreeing with anything you're saying, I just wanted to go on a rant of disbelief. I made this post because I felt like I was missing something but you just confirmed I really wasn't.
First of all, thank you for spending so much time and effort thinking about such a nonsense topic. I agree with everything you said but it got me thinking even more.
Pirate movies are definitely more cost-prohibitive than Westerns, but I wonder if that also led into a feedback loop of keeping Westerns in the public consciousness. Since Westerns kept being made, it kept people thinking about Westerns, which kept the desire for more Westerns alive. I also think there's an aspect of the Hays Code at play where you were able to make righteous characters in Westerns (those boring John Wayne movies I can't sit through) yet you can't really make a "righteous pirate" character. So pirates were always delegated to the role of "bad guys", if they were present at all. There just wasn't a demand for pirate movies to expand into supernatural elements.
And yet none of that explains the lack of supernatural pirate stories in literature (or video games) where your imagination is the main limiting factor. Even if we ignore movies, there are very few dark fantasy pirate stories prior to PotC. And I guess this just comes down to my own lack of awareness to, I guess I'll say 'the zeitgeist' even though that makes me sound pretentious. In my mind, I lump together gunslingers, pirates, and hackers as "outlaws glorified for living by their own code". And yet it seems one of them is drastically less popular than the others. I never really thought about how few people actually care about pirates. Weird West and Cyberpunk are both niche genre fiction, yet dark fantasy pirate stories don't even have a label. That's a weird realization for me.