User blog comment:Assassinetta/Pirates 5?/@comment-3106883-20110715015717

For each of the Star Trek: the Next Generation movies, fans debated what role Spock would play. Turned out to be none, and only for the first movie did they consider having Spock at all. If you are willing to brave the imdb.com forum for The Dark Knight Rises, there are people debating what form the Joker's cameo will take. That's in the face of Christopher Nolan's repeated and absolute declarations that it is not happening. On a directly Pirates note, on the Pirates series wikipedia entry, it listed Stellan Skarsgard (Bootstrap) as playing a zombie in OST. It didn't happen. Megan Fox was rumoured to be playing a mermaid in OST. It didn't happen. Russell Brand was rumoured to be in OST, and it didn't happen. Now what I presume are identical rumours are appearing. It won't happen. Whoever is spreading the rumour presumably wants it to happen, and is trying to force the producers to make it happen by having lots of people believe it.

In short, I recommend you ignore any news that doesn't verifiably come direct from Disney or Bruckheimer (or similar), and just ignore rumours completely.

As for whether they should continue to make Pirates, I'm going to keep watching Pirates until the franchise stops entertaining me. Considering how much new garbage is produced, I'm perfectly happy following an established franchise.