The Genre in the Past 

It's been a long time since pirate stories were surefire box-office hits, when Douglas Fairbanks Sr. slid down the sail of a ship on his knife in 1926's "The Black Pirate" or Errol Flynn fenced with glee in "Captain Blood" (1935) and "The Sea Hawk" (1940).

Dozens of imitators followed, but many suffered from a lack of innovation.

"They took these fantasies and then made them very sexual," said historian Jan Rogozinski, author of the book "Pirates!: Brigands, Buccaneers, and Privateers in Fact, Fiction and Legend." "They all had lots of men with naked chests, women with almost naked chests, and they always had a good flogging scene. Everything was stereotyped and I guess it just bored people."

Eventually, pirates became a joke, he added, citing such spoofs as 1944's "The Princess and the Pirate," with Bob Hope as a sailor named Sylvester the Great, and 1946's "Three Little Pirates," in which the Three Stooges annoyed a villain named Black Louie. "They became really campy and really dumb ... which sort of killed it off for a while," Rogozinski said.

There is so much misfortune connected with the genre that DreamWorks refuses to acknowledge that its new cartoon, "Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas," is a pirate movie, even though the hero fits the profile – a rascally sailor who snatches treasure from rival ships. (What else would you call that?)

It also fits the box-office profile of most pirate films: It sank. DreamWorks rejected interview requests for this story.

Among the wreckage of other pirate movies from the past rests the recent hulk of Disney's animated "Treasure Planet", a retelling of the classic Robert Louis Stevenson novel "Treasure Island" with high-tech Spanish galleons wafting through outer space with alien crews and mechanical-armed pirates.

The movie, with a reported budget of $140 million, debuted weakly last November and sank quickly from the box office, earning only about $38 million – a loss so severe Disney later downgraded its earnings estimate for the last quarter of 2002.

Before that came Carolco Picture's mammoth 1995 failure "Cutthroat Island", starring Geena Davis as a sword-wielding woman trying to recover part of a treasure map from a villainous pirate uncle. At a reported cost of $80 million to $100 million, it earned a devastating $10 million at the box office. The debacle helped bankrupt Carolco and earned "Cutthroat Island" a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as one of the costliest movie flops in history.

David Stapleton, a history buff who created an online compendium of pirate movies, said many of Hollywood's recent takes on the genre lacked heart, focusing too much on costumes, sets and action.

"From a historical standpoint virtually every pirate movie that has been made is trash. They pay absolutely no homage to history whatsoever, but that's not why we go to see them. We go to see because we're enamored with the mythology," said Stapleton, a 42-year-old software engineer from Orange County.

The image of the pirate retains a paradoxical place in American lore – at once revered as a hero and reviled as a scoundrel. Have pirate stories lost favor because America has a stricter moral standing about such thieves? Not necessarily.