Recently, Disney has decided to go all in on its live-action remakes. The company is also invested in making movies based on popular attractions, most recently releasing Haunted Mansion on July 28. Haunted Mansion is not the first Disney film based on a ride, Disney has also made Jungle Cruise, Mission to Mars, Country Bear Jamboree, and The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, among others. Disney is also currently developing movies based on Space Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.
While Disney is continuing to work on ride-based movies, none of them have reached the level of popularity and success that came with the 2003 movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The film starred Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow and was an immediate hit with fans. The Curse of the Black Pearl was so successful that Disney made four more movies and is reportedly working on a sixth.
Many might think that it would be any actor’s dream to star in a franchise like Pirates of the Caribbean. However, for one superstar actress, that is not the case. Guardians of the Galaxy star Zoe Saldaña, who played Anamaria in The Curse of the Black Pearl, revealed that, even though it was a great movie with great acting, she would never want to return to the franchise.
In a recent interview with Buzzfeed UK, Saldana admitted that her experience on Pirates is “not worth repeating.”
“A hard production, it was just so big, it was too big of a machine for me”, is how Zoe defines her POTC experience. “What I see [on] screen, I’m very proud of… but I don’t ever wanna go back… There was just a lot of politics [and] I felt really lost and very small in that big machine, but I’m happy for all of the actors that benefitted from [it].”
This is not the first time that Saldana has been open about her not-so-great experience on the Pirates set. She has said in the past that she felt “lost in the trenches” because of how large a production it was. She also revealed that, years later, she met with Pirates producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who actually apologized to her for the experience she had.
Saldana said that Bruckheimer told her he wanted everyone to have a great time while working on one of his films. Saldana was touched by his apology, noting that he must have heard her talk about what happened and he wanted to take accountability.
