“A lot of it is Keira Knightley,” Holderness admits.
Even though the first movie came out in 2003, people still make gifs of iconic moments, draw fan art, and write up posts examining the lore and character arcs of the franchise. Holderness says she regularly sees it pop up from time to time. It’s not as if Pirates of the Caribbean’s recent surge in popularity was uncalled for. “Actually, it’s a bigger number than I anticipated.”
“We saw a 1,207% increase in engagements around Pirates of the Caribbean for the week ending on April 4th compared to the week of March 28,” says Tumblr head of editorial Cates Holderness. Last week, like a sleeping kraken rising from the depths, Pirates of the Caribbean breached the most buzzed about movie list on Tumblr’s official Fandometrics blog. The original post ended up racking up tens of thousands of notes, and soon enough so many people were posting about Pirates of the Caribbean that the franchise became the number one trending topic on Tumblr in the first week of April. Image: Disneyīut nothing on the internet is ever completely isolated, and the joke bled out from the community it started out on, and further from its initial context. Instead, it was simply meant to be an inside joke among the Pirates of the Caribbean fandom on Tumblr. While the original post was made on March 31, it wasn’t exactly an April Fool’s joke. At least to a reader only loosely familiar with the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise. But with some edited screenshots hinting at a relationship between Sparrow (played by Johnny Depp) and fellow pirate Hector Barbossa (played by Geoffrey Rush) and a few other blogs playing along, it certainly seemed like it could be true. More importantly, the post argued that because this trio could be a possible competitor to Superwholock, the infamous hybrid Supernatural-Doctor Who- Sherlock fandom that ruled Tumblr in the early 2010s.įor the record, Jack Sparrow is not canonically gay divorced. The post argues that Pirates of the Caribbean deserves a place at the table with Our Flag Means Death and Black Sails, as an example of pirate media with queer representation. “I cannot BELIEVE how soon you people forgot that jack sparrow is literally canonically gay divorced,” reads the end of a Tumblr post by user everythingispirates.