I typically tend to avoid these stories when a name is attached to a picture, but their involvement isn’t confirmed, but Michael Fleming’s piece at Variety saying Rob Marshall looks like he will be directing Pirates of the Caribbean 4 seems quite confident unless things completely derail as he writes:
Sources say unless things break down at the last moment, Marshall will be steering the pirate vehicle’s next installment.
Visually I would say Marshall fits right in with the franchise, and Marshall isn’t even all that unfamiliar with big budget set pieces, but I would say it seems like a long walk from a film like Chicago or Memoirs with a Geisha to a Pirates of the Caribbean flick. Then again the fact Disney is hoping to scale things back from the second and third installments of the franchise that went CG-heavy may change our perception. After all, the first Pirates feature looks like a walk-in-the-park compared to the scope of its sequels.
During Comic Con last week Disney’s Head of Production Oren Aviv told Coming Soon, “It’s important to get the story right and it’s important to me to scale it down, because we can’t get bigger. The movies have subsequently gotten bigger and bigger and very complicated and they were satisfying on so many levels obviously, but I want to kind of reboot the whole thing and bring it down to its core, its essence, just characters.”
Speaking of characters, Fleming also adds that while Marshall’s involvement wasn’t immediately confirmed, sources said things look good enough that the studio has begun casting new characters that will appear in the picture.
Aviv also told Coming Soon, “We’re going to shoot Pirates 4 in April and May of [2010]. We are going to release it hopefully in 2011 is the plan.” He said that this time they would only be doing one movie this time that would “hopefully be the first of another trilogy.”
The plan is to get the film into production before Johnny Depp does The Lone Ranger. As for Marshall, he has Nine coming out this November.
