Yes, The Mummy was an artistic disaster and limped to $408 million worldwide almost entirely on Tom Cruise’s star power. But if we still get Bill Condon’s The Bride of Frankenstein in 2020 or later, it’ll be protected by the likes of Fast and Furious 9 and Minions 2. And that’s not even counting if we get a fast-tracked Dwayne Johnson/Jason Statham Fast and Furious spinoff to replace the FF9 that just moved to April of 2020. The Dark Universe isn’t in great shape, but it’s not remotely a do-or-die franchise for Universal. They can cancel it (or make Bride entirely stand-alone and/or make it an outright R-rated horror movie) or they can roll the dice precisely because they don’t need it.

Walt Disney is in the same boat with Pirates, a series that is much more successful than (for example, in terms of will they/won’t they sequels) Tron: Legacy or Pacific Rim ever was. The funny thing is, in any other situation, we’d absolutely be getting a sequel to a movie that earned $794 million worldwide, no matter the critical response. Heck, Disney just hired one of the Pirates 5 directors to helm Maleficent 2, over three years after that Angelina Jolie fantasy snagged $759m worldwide. So it will be interesting to see if Dead Men Tell No Tales is really the end of the line.

Universal/Comcast Corp. and Walt Disney are in similar envious positions right now, in that they can choose to continue or end their franchises precisely because they have enough other biggies that those properties are not essential to their survival. I might argue that Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. is in the same boat with the LEGO movies after LEGO Movie 2. Has Jack Sparrow sunk his last ship? Will the Dark Universe live long enough to get its proverbial Wonder Woman? Or maybe Universal can just arbitrarily designate Glass as the next chapter in the Dark Universe. I’ve been begging them to slap the Illumination label on the next batch of Laika movies for a year now. This story is most certainly to be continued.

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Pirates Of Caribbean In Order

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