Pirates of the Caribbean's cast, as seen last week making an appearance at the Cannes festival.

If you’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a movie you probably want it to be, for the lack of a better word, good. But if it’s going to fail in that regard, you want it to fail spectacularly. If you’re going to spend big bucks on all the latest bells and whistles, the worst-case scenario is for your movie to be forgettably bad.

There are countless examples of this.

Everyone remembers Batman and Robin, or at the very least they remember that the bat suit had nipples, but nobody remembers Poseidon, the lameduck Richard Dreyfuss vehicle that somehow made a cruise ship flipping upside-down boring. Poseidon is probably the better movie, but Batman and Robin was so outlandishly bad that it left a mark on pop culture. The nipples live on.

It’s also the reason everyone was disappointed with Snakes on a Plane a few years back. It was a dumb premise, but promised ridiculous thrills. Then, somehow, it had a karate master on the plane but never gave him the chance to kick a snake. How does an oversight like that even happen?

In any movie, the only reason you’d establish a character’s karate skills is to get the audience excited for the moment when, finally, he kicks something. Maybe it’s a snake, maybe it’s Bradley Cooper. Either way, it’s going to be awesome to see it get kicked. Instead Snakes on a Plane skipped the kicks and committed the cardinal sin of being boring.

An example of a director who seems to understand this notion is Michael Bay. Despite how truly horrible Transformers 2 was, Bay made sure it was memorable. How? By including Mudflap and Skids, the illiterate robots inspired by, I assume, 1890s blackface performers. They weren’t just racist; they were old-school racist. That’s how you make sure nobody forgets your awful, awful movie. Take notes people.

The reason this is significant is because the early word on Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is universally bad. But even worse, the word coming out of the advanced screenings suggests that it’s boring. None of the Pirates movies have amounted to great cinema and they’ve very rarely made any sense, but at the very least they’ve had memorable characters, exciting naval battles and some good laughs.

And while most of those laughs came from Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow, he was never the central character. Yes, he was the star, but the plots of all three films revolved around Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley’s characters. Sparrow would mostly provide commentary on the nonsense in the script.

But Bloom and Knightley have moved on in the latest instalment, leaving Depp as the central character. This is a woeful miscalculation. To have Sparrow as the main character requires him to be invested in the movie’s proceedings. Sparrow can’t simply be making wisecracks while going along for the ride. He has to care about what’s happening, or the audience won’t. If he’s not scared, the audience won’t be scared.

So either Sparrow breaks the tension with a joke and the stakes never seem that high, or he gets less funny-time. And if Jack Sparrow’s not going to be funny, what’s the point of another Pirates movie?

Elsewhere, Thor is still going strong. Yes Chris Helmsworth is ripped, and yes he’s beautiful. But really this movie only confirms that Marvel’s on an unprecedented hot streak and it’s time to just give in and acknowledge that The Avengers is going to be the biggest movie forever and ever. There’s really nothing the people at Marvel can’t do. Think about it, patriotism’s been out of fashion for a little while now in America, but with Captain America Osama bin Laden goes out and gets himself killed and suddenly everybody’s all up and God Blessin’ America all over again. That, my friends, is good marketing.

Fast Five is still around, hilariously. It’s somehow turned into the top grossing film in the entire Fast and Furious franchise, and proves what I was saying earlier about not being boring. It’s set in Rio, which eliminates any possibility of Tokyo drifting. Given that Tokyo drifting has so far been the most memorable thing about this franchise so far, this could have been a disastrous development. But nope, not for these crafty macho car-loving writers. They basically got rid of any car racing whatsoever and instead had the characters focus on stealing shit and kicking each other. Kicking. It’s all it takes.