Starring: Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom, Bill Nighy, and Stellan Skarsgård
Drected by: Gore Verbinski
Release Date: July 7, 2006

Pirates wasn’t conceived as a franchise, so “it’s been difficult to reverse-engineer a trilogy,” says director Gore Verbinski, who is shooting two sequels to 2003’s $305 million–grossing original simultaneously. “I feel like we’re on Project Greenlight. On steroids.” In Dead Man’s Chest, Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack is back (as are Orlando Bloom’s Will and Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth, who plan to be married) and has a debt to settle with an old nemesis: Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), the half-man, half–sea creature who captains the Flying Dutchman and has an octopus for a beard and a crab claw for a hand. “He is a very upset guy,” says Nighy (Love Actually). “He’s so wounded from love that he literally tore his heart out and stuck it in a locker deep in the sea so he never has to feel again.” Other adversaries include a sea monster called the Kraken, some cannibals, and the East India Trading Company (sort of the Wal-Mart of its time), which wants to put a foot on the neck of all independent pirates. “Everything we talked about in the first movie is referred to and embellished on in the second and third,” says producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Any update on Depp’s muse Keith Richards playing Jack’s father? “Keith is on tour,” Bruckheimer says. “I hope it will work out, but you never know.”