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Question of the week: What would Walt Disney think about a film bearing his imprimatur featuring not one but two minor characters being dispatched with a gunshot to the center of the forehead?

Runner-up question of the week: How would our cinematic universe be different (or not) if producer Don Simpson had not died from cardiac arrest due to combined drug intoxication 15 years ago next January?

This column and next, I will take a look at two of the most successful, polarizing, blockbuster-iest Chapter Twos of the last ten years, and by extension, the trilogies of which they are the middle chapters. A key issue to consider is: what was gained and lost when these films became trilogies? Would staying non-sequeled films have more positively enshrined their cinematic legacy? Certainly, their respective studio’s coffers would have been a lot worse for the absence. Interestingly, both films performed similarly in their domestic box-office trends, an aspect that will be examined more closely next time around.

By way of introduction: I don’t often suffer from anything that could be accurately labeled as “writer’s block”, but I have struggled with the foundation for this column for the past three weeks. A lot of it has been a rather severe scatterbrained tendency and almost laughable lack of focus due to many sleepless nights brought about by a certain child who has taken to waking up every one to two hours instead of every four to five.

When a mind, groggy and delirious at 3:30 in the morning, wanders adrift to consider various ins, outs and what-have-yous that would be perfect to include in one’s writing, it comes to seem that much more daunting by daylight that the writing in question hasn’t actually begun. That said, a fair share of the burden did come from simply wading my way through the films in question: 463 minutes (seven-and-a-half-hours) of my life.

I had seen Curse of the Black Pearl once during its cheap-seat run in 2003. My lone thought in retrospect was that Johnny Depp turned a $140-million-dollar tentpole production into something that had, at times, almost an off-the-cuff raggedness to it. Without him, it would be, well, a film based on a Disneyland theme park attraction. I watched Dead Man’s Chest on DVD after it came out and, I struggled mightily to get through it without falling asleep. This entailed stopping and starting the film several times. I had held off on At World’s End because any desire to see resolution of the cliffhangers raised at the end of Dead Man’s Chest had more or less dissipated by 2007.

To return to the queries at the top of the column - perhaps both these questions seem hopelessly naïve and the former more than slightly hypocritical. I will deal with the first question now and the second a little later on. In my last column, I waxed rhapsodic about the aftermath of a particularly vicious beheading in the film Shogun Assassin. Suffice to say, if said individual had misplaced his noggin in a Walt Disney feature, I would have been more than horrified.

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