The Pirates of the Caribbean 2 Scene Originally Written For Zorro

screenrant.com:

One elaborate moment in the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie, 2006’sDead Man’s Chest, was originally written for an earlier blockbuster, 1998’s The Mask of Zorro. By the time Dead Man’s Chest was released, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise could do pretty much anything. The first movie in the series was an unexpectedly huge hit upon its release in 2003, so the first sequel’s expected financial success meant that the blockbuster movie was given carte blanche when it came to the movie's creative ambitions.

As a result of this, the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio took this as a chance to revisit a sequence that was vetoed in one of their earlier hits. Dead Man’s Chest villain Cutler Beckett required an appropriately dramatic entrance in the second movie of the series. Thus, Elliott and Rossio brought back a scene that almost made it into their earlier adventure hit, The Mask of Zorro.

Related: Pirates of the Caribbean's Pirate Betrayal Was Deeper Than You Realized

Beckett’s introduction — wherein he is seen sitting on horseback while on a ship coming into harbor — was written for The Mask of Zorro’s main villain Don Rafael Montero by the screenwriting duo. When it was deemed prohibitively expensive for that blockbuster to stage the scene during production, they reused the sequence in  Dead Man’s Chest thanks to the movie’s massive budget. Although the franchise’s on-set historical advisor noted that the act would be suicidal in reality, the writers were unmoved and the scene stayed in place, taking only a day to shoot. Although expensive, the moment established Beckett as a formidable villain unmatched by later Pirates of the Caribbean sequels.

The scene