I'm gonna go in a different direction than everyone else here.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl
is a big budget movie that had absolutely no business getting made, because:
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Pirate movies have always been box office poison. Less than a decade earlier, Cutthroat Island made the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest box office bomb of all time, the latest in a series of pirate-themed failures. The only vaguely pirate-themed movies that had ever had anything you'd call success was Muppet Treasure Island and Goonies, and you could argue that Goonies wasn't really a pirate movie, it had some pirate theming in it. In 2002, Disney's Treasure Planet, basically Treasure Island IN SPAAACE had proven a box office flop. Treasure Planet is a well-written, well-made, well-advertised, well-reviewed pirate movie that failed at the box office. What idiot would bankroll another pirate film?
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It was a movie based on an old ride at Disney World. It was their fourth attempt at this, they made a TV movie based on Tower of Terror in 1997 that they're apparently not proud of, 2000s Mission To Mars was a "commercial disappointment" and 2002's The Country Bears was a critical and commercial flop. Yeah the year before they made Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney made a G-rated pastiche of the Blues Brothers out of The Country Bear Jamboree. They decided to do that and nobody stopped them. No movie based on a theme park attraction had ever made its money back.
The public's reaction to the announcement was "They're making a movie based on WHAT?" This wasn't going to work. This movie had no business being made.
The film achieved massive critical and commercial success as the 141st highest grossing movie of all time taking $654.3 million against it's $140 million budget and spawning four sequels.