Published Jun 26, 2026, 11:41 AM EDT
Chris is a Senior News Writer for Collider. He can be found in an IMAX screen, with his eyes watering and his ears bleeding for his own pleasure. He joined the news team in 2022 and accidentally fell upwards into a senior position despite his best efforts.
For reasons unknown, he enjoys analyzing box office receipts, giant sharks, and has become known as the go-to man for all things Bosch, Mission: Impossible and Christopher Nolan in Collider’s news division. Recently, he found himself yeehawing along to the Dutton saga on the Yellowstone Ranch.
He is proficient in sarcasm, wit, Photoshop and working unfeasibly long hours. Amongst his passions sit the likes of the history of the Walt Disney Company, the construction of theme parks, steam trains and binge-watching Gilmore Girls with a coffee that is just hot enough to scald him.
His obsession with the Apple TV+ series Silo is the subject of mockery within the Senior News channel, where his feelings about Taylor Sheridan’s work are enough to make his fellow writers roll their eyes.
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Drink up me hearties, yo ho! The legacy of Pirates of the Caribbean is an enduring one. A passion project of Walt Disney himself — indeed, there exists audio footage of Disney excitedly describing the project to a potential visitor to Disneyland — the brand has evolved from a ride, to a series of rides, to a billion dollar movie franchise that even garnered Academy Award nominations and made Johnny Depp a mega star. Now, 59 years later, Pirates just got one of the biggest updates in its history.
Disneyland has officially reopened the New Orleans Square ride in its original park with a major new effect tucked into one of its most familiar scenes. Guests floating through the treasure-filled grotto segment of the ride will now see a pirate sitting atop a pile of cursed gold transform from a flesh-and-blood buccaneer into a skeleton right before their eyes, just as Barbossa’s crew does in the 2003 movie.
The new effect was developed by Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development and uses next-generation Audio-Animatronics technology, of which they have long been pioneers. Rather than relying only on a traditional figure swap or lighting trick, the effect combines real-time front projection with a mechanical head to make the pirate’s transformation look much more detailed and expressive. There truly aren’t enough superlatives to describe the work they’ve done in Imagineering throughout the decades.
Your answers point to the world your instincts were built for. This is the universe your temperament, your survival instincts, and your particular brand of stubbornness were made for.
You took the red pill a long time ago — probably before anyone offered it to you. You’re a systems thinker who can’t help but notice the seams in things.
The wasteland doesn’t reward the clever or the well-connected — it rewards those who are hard to kill and harder to break. That’s you.
You’d survive here because you know how to exist in moral grey areas without losing yourself completely.
Arrakis is the most hostile environment in the known universe — and you are precisely the kind of person it rewards.
The galaxy far, far away is vast, loud, and in a constant state of violent political upheaval — and you wouldn’t have it any other way.
The plan, clearly, is to continue the franchise but whether it has Depp at the helm is another question entirely. In 2024, the ***Top Gun: Maverick and F1 *mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer told Collider’s Steve Weintraub **that he and his team are “working” on a sixth Pirates of the Caribbean film.
“Jeff Nathanson (screenwriter of the last entry in 2017, Dead Men Tell No Tales) is working on a script. We have another one… We have two, and we don’t know who’s going to win the horse race at this point. But hopefully in the next month, I’ll have a script, and maybe Disney will want to make it,” Bruckheimer told Collider.
Last year, Bruckheimer revealed that he’d spoken with Depp about returning for a sixth film, offering new hope. “If he likes the way the part’s written, I think he would do it,” Bruckheimer said. “It’s all about what’s on the page, as we all know… We are still working on a screenplay. We want to make it. We just got to get the right screenplay. We haven’t quite gotten there yet, but we’re close.”
The new Pirates of the Caribbean is open in Disneyland. The franchise streams on Disney+.
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Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Stuart Beattie, Jay Wolpert