Thank you, Hollywood, for making it a slow news day while I’m out of the country. It’s nice to see that I haven’t been missing much.
But how to fill a slow news day? How about this: Tim Powers, author of 1987’s On Stranger Tides, the pirate book upon which Pirates of the Caribbean 4 will be at least partially based, doesn’t even know how much of his book they’ll use.
“I’ve watched all the movies several times, of course, and I think the clear thing they would use is the trip to the Fountain of Youth,” Powers told the LA Times. “My main character doesn’t overlap with Jack Sparrow at all [in personality or circumstance]; they’re totally different characters. I suppose they might overlap the Geoffrey Rush character Barbossa and Blackbeard. The only thing I feel certain they will hold on to is the Fountain of Youth since they telegraphed that at the end of the last movie.”
Somewhat interesting is the fact that Disney actually optioned the book three years ago and Powers has been under a gag order all that time. That means they were very much interested in finding further Pirates stories, and I bet that On Stranger Tides isn’t the only book they optioned. Some enterprising blogger will likely find out what other books/spec scripts the Mouse House bought and clue us in on what might be the plots of Pirates 5 and 6.