On its US release, many were ready to gleefully dismiss Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranges Tides as a comparative failure, saying that a sub-$100 million opening showed that audiences were bored of Pirates. However they spoke too soon, or at least they did if they thought globally, as the film has now become only the eighth movie ever to pass $1 billion at the box office.
However it’s done this with an incredibly unusual disparity between what the movie made in the US compared to how much it’s grossed in the rest of the world. Normally movies make between 30% and 50% of their entire gross in North America, however Pirates 4 has only made 23% of its money in the US (in the top 50 highest grossing movies ever, only Ice Age 3 and 2012 made a smaller percentage of their cash in America).
That means that with a current total of $774 million outside America, Pirates 4 is now the third highest grossing movie ever internationally (i.e. excluding the US and Canada), with only Titanic and Avatar making more. It’s a highly unusual situation. While Americans do tend to like big movies with British accents slightly less than the rest of the world (the Harry Potters also do much better internationally than in the US), it’s rare for things to be this out of step. Some have said it’s because Americans are tiring of 3D, but that only goes some way to explaining why Pirates 4 would be the lowest grossing film in the series in the US, but the third highest grossing film of all time internationally.
By the end of next weekend, Pirates 4 is likely to have overtaken Alice In Wonderland to become the sixth highest grossing film ever. However we’ll have to wait and see if it can reach the $1.066 billion of Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, to become the highest grossing film in the series (which was helped by the fact it grossed nearly $200 million more in the US that On Stranger Tides has).