When the subtile for the fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean movie was announced, On Stranger Tides, some people immediately noted that it was the same title as a pirate novel by Tim Powers, which involves Blackbeard and a search for the fountain of youth. Well, now the LA Times has confirmed that Disney has indeed bought the rights to the book to serve as an inspiration for Pirates 4.
However while Powers seems pretty pleased that he’s now allowed to confirm that the movie will use his book, he does seem to realise that not a lot of his novel will actually appear in the final movie, saying, “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.”
Now Empire has asked Pirates screenwriter Terry Rossio about how the book will be translated into the Pirates world. Rossio says, “We wanted to do a story about Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth, and Tim Powers wrote a book about Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth… it just turns out that to do that story you would need that book. It’s a brilliant and Tim Powers is an amazing writer – and it’s a great title. It allows us to draw material from that universe and his expertise… I don’t know if its proper to say it’s based on it but there are enough common elements to think that the book had to be optioned to us to reasonably proceed along that story line.”
What that sounds like is that there won’t actually be a lot of Powers’ book in On Stranger Tides, but Disney was well aware that he could sue them if they made Pirates 4 about Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth, and so they bought the rights to the novel to prevent this. The movie is currently scheduled for a July 2011 release.