Trivia / Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

• Awesome, Dear Boy: According to Orlando Bloom, a reason why he returned was his attraction to the idea of him Playing Against Type as a mutated sea-creature/human hybrid like Davy Jones.
• B-Team Sequel: Rob Marshall was rumoured to return to direct, but declined after choosing to direct Into the Woods. Gore Verbinski passed on the project, feeling that "there's no reason other than financial" in making the film. Also, Hans Zimmer was unable to score the film, as he was working on Dunkirk.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: In the Japanese dub, Carina is voiced by Chiaki Kuriyama, aka Go-Go Yubari.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Salazar, when he died, was significantly older than Jack Sparrow. Johnny Depp is actually six years older than Javier Bardem.
  • Henry Turner is supposedly 21, five years younger than Brenton Thwaites at the time of filming. This is not helped by his on-screen parents (who are only 4 and 12 years older than him), seemingly have aged only a decade - the Sequel Gap since their last appearance - instead of two.
• Development Gag: Jack's look in the flashback exactly matches the original character design◊ for the first movie before Johnny Depp took things into his own hands.
• Fake Brit: Apart from Geoffrey Rush reprising his role as Hector Barbossa, the cast is joined by two more Australians playing English characters: Brenton Thwaites as Henry Turner and David Wenham as Admiral Scarfield.
• Follow the Leader: The film's promotional campaign seems to be taking notes from that of Logan, with the ominous Johnny Cash music and whatnot. Coincidentally, it also features a central character of the series meeting his biological daughter and sacrificing himself in her defense.
• Franchise Killer: Its poor reception and low domestic box office gross (second-lowest grossing film in the franchise, after The Curse of the Black Pearl, which was a franchise-launching smash hit nonetheless compared to its budget) resulted in Disney canceling plans for future movies and opting to reboot the franchise, adding that Depp would not return in any capacity to the reboot series.
• Meaningful Release Date:
  • The film was widely released on Memorial Day. Salazar, the film's villain, is the ghost of a dead Spanish soldier.
  • The date is almost exactly ten years after At World's End. Ten years, as in how many years Will Turner must wait before he can set foot on land again.
• The Other Darrin: Barbossa was voiced by Philippe Catoire in the French dub due to Geoffrey Rush's usual dub actor since 2003, Patrick Floersheim, having passed away in 2016.
• Reality Subtext: This is the film where Jack Sparrow appears to have hit rock bottom in terms of his intelligence, common sense, and reputation. Johnny Depp filmed this movie during a dark time in his life where he was caught up in a bitter divorce and was on a roll of critical and box-office failures like Alice Through the Looking Glass, Mortdecai, and Transcendence.
• Real-Life Relative: Director Joachim Rønning's two children appear in the film as extras.
• Refitted for Sequel: Davy Jones and his crew were originally going to be ghost pirates in Dead Man's Chest, before being changed into the Crustacean-human hybrids seen in the final film, probably to make them different from Barbossa and his cursed crew. This original idea may have been the inspiration for Salazar and his crew in this film.
• Role Reprise: Orlando Bloom (Will Turner), Keira Knightley (Elizabeth Swann), Martin Klebba (Marty), Giles New (Murtogg), and Angus Barnett (Mullroy) all return ten years after Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting: Brenton Thwaites looks exactly like what someone would expect a child of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley to look like. It got to the point that viewers figured out his character's identity almost as soon as he was cast - and the studios didn't even bother trying to keep it a secret.
• Sequel Gap: Came out six years after On Stranger Tides.
• Similarly Named Works: Dead Men Tell No Tales is also the title of the first episode of the 1990s Zorro series.
• Troubled Production:
  • The film was being produced as Johnny Depp was going through an addiction relapse. As such, he was chronically late to the set, as most of his time was spent drinking and getting into fights with his now ex-wife Amber Heard, to the point where it ate into the schedule as the set often came to a halt for hours at a time. It got to the point where a production assistant was hired just to wait outside Depp's house and announce that he was awake when they saw the lights inside come on.
  • Depp, who was also doing hard drugs during the production, took about eight ecstasy pills one weekend and went on a rampage in which he severed his fingertip and did about $100,000 worth of damage to the house which Disney was paying for. The ordeal caused production to be shut down for a precious and expensive two weeks since he had to go home to the US to see a specialist and have surgery.
  • This was nothing compared to the fight with the Australian government after Depp and Heard lied on biosecurity forms to bring their dogs with them to film the movie, which took up a whole year and saw Disney and all the Pirates fans wondering if he was going to be charged with dog smuggling. Heard pleaded guilty to perjury because the dogs technically belonged to her but both of them had to publicly admit they broke the law and pay a substantial fine. This drawn out affair was a draw on Disney's already thinning patience with him as they were already upset with him for both the damage caused to the house and because they believed he'd lied to them and their insurers about being sober when his contract was renewed and in large part lead to them deciding to cut ties with him for good and reboot the series from scratch.
• Wag the Director: The original script contained a female villain. Johnny Depp vetoed this, as he felt it was too similar to Dark Shadows.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Taron Egerton, George Mackay, Ansel Elgort, Sam Keeley and Mitchell Hope screen-tested for the role of Henry Turner before the casting of Brenton Thwaites.
  • Gabriella Wilde, Alexandra Dowling, Jenna Thiam and Lucy Boynton read for the part of Carina Smyth before Kaya Scodelario was cast.
  • Christoph Waltz was originally cast as Captain Salazar, then named Captain Brand, before the casting of Javier Bardem. However, Waltz turned down the offer due to scheduling conflicts with other projects.
  • Sam Raimi, Tim Burton, Alfonso Cuarón, Rupert Sanders, Chris Weitz and Shawn Levy were considered to direct the movie before Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg were hired.
  • Keith Richards expressed interest in reprising his role as Jack Sparrow's father Captain Teague, but he was unavailable, leading Johnny Depp to invite Paul McCartney into appearing as Jack Sparrow's uncle.
  • Originally, Barbossa's daughter, who may or may not have been Carina, would have been closer to Jack's age and been his love interest.
  • According to screenwriter Terry Rossio, the original screenplay featured a female villain, and changing this at Depp's insistence (Depp apparently believed it would feel recycled after his other film Dark Shadows, which also featured a female villain) altered what had been the intended course of the franchise so thoroughly Rossio claims it "destroy[ed] years of story creation and world-building."
  • Syrena and Phillip from On Stranger Tides were in the original script. There would have been a subplot where they were separated from each other and she developed amnesia. She would have become one of the Queen of Spain's handmaidens while he searched for her.
  • The film was originally going to reveal that Jack's compass originally belonged to Salazar. Footage of an alive Salazar holding the compass was shot, but the item's background was changed mid-production and the scene was deleted.
• You Look Familiar: Lesaro is played by Juan Carlos Vellido, who played one of the Spanish fishermen from the previous film.

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