Will Mixed Reviews For Pirates 4 Hurt Box Office

The first set of reviews for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides are beginning to trickle out and the opinions seem to be mixed. The first posted by the Guardian was pretty negative but the second by The Hollywood Reporter was fairly positive (admittedly mixed reviews for a summer blockbuster aren’t exactly rare).

Rather than getting into the nitty-gritty of the reviews themselves, the question I ask is will this hurt the box office takings of Pirates 4?

Pirates 4 Movie Poster

Personally I think this could go either way, as both the previous sequels received similar mixed reviews and still took huge money at the Box Office (over a billion in the case of Pirates2). However, I would argue that Dead Man’s Chest was riding high on the goodwill built up by the first film, and being the first part in an over-arching story audiences wanted to see the conclusion in At World’s End, so negative reviews were kind of irrelevant to the average movie-goer.

The fourth instalment brings a new story and a new director (and loses some of the original cast) but I imagine some film-goers aren’t as thrilled for a new Pirates film after Part 3 (the weakest in the original trilogy), so it will be interesting to see if the audiences lowered expectations combined with the negative reviews have a detrimental effect on the box office takings for Part 4.

We'll find out next week when Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is released in the UK and US.

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