With all of the drama that has been going on with Disney, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — the fourth installment in the franchise — and star Johnny Depp, it’s a miracle that things are still full steam ahead. But as it were, not only is it all moving forward, but the movie is now planning to begin shooting this Summer with Depp ready to go for at least this one last time.
Now, since the ending of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, everyone has expected any additional movies to involve the long-desired Fountain of Youth. We were even informed that the movie would be based on Tim Powers‘ 1987 book that inspired the sub-title, On Stranger Tides, which did involve the Fountain, but still nothing had really been confirmed yet…that I had known about.
As it turns out, Empire Magazine actually spoke to Pirates writer Terry Rossio back in October, and all was confirmed then. And while the book in question is not the full inspiration of the new movie, it has enough of the elements that the film makers wanted to use that it was just safer and easier to acquire the rights to the novel as well.
Here’s what Rossio had to say:
We wanted to do a story about Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth, and Tim Powers wrote a book about Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth… it just turns out that to do that story you would need that book. It’s brilliant and Tim Powers is an amazing writer – and it’s a great title. It allows us to draw material from that universe and his expertise.
I don’t know if its proper to say it’s based on it but there are enough common elements to think that the book had to be optioned to us to reasonably proceed along that story line.
At the moment, the only other returning main character that we know of will of course be Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), but surely many of the other smaller characters will be back. The only two that are not coming back (aside from the always-possible cameo) is Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley.
[Source: Yahoo!]
