Sitting in front of a big screen for two hours watching Johnny Depp jump around like Mick Jagger with kohl lining his eyes is just as entertaining for me as anybody else, but haven’t we gone just a little too far already with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise?

I think the general consensus was that each movie got more and more complicated—and not for the best—lost ample amounts of characterization, and pretty much let fans down with a once-every-decade conjugal visit between Swan and Turner (or rather, Turner and Turner…). What more could we possibly want from Jack-I-Eat-My-Own-Brain Sparrow?

Apparently a trip to find the Fountain of Youth, as was hinted at in At World’s End. Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides has been announced, and will be in theaters in 2011. Disney wants the movie to be released before its new film, The Lone Ranger, which also stars Depp.

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer says that production will begin in April of 2010, and the film will include Depp playing Captain Jack Sparrow once again. Geoffrey Rush may also reappear as Captain Barbosa, my personal favorite character in the series.

The movie may entail the two captains of the Black Pearl meeting up in New Orleans before heading out to find the Fountain of Youth together; after all, we know that each of them has a part of the map—and Barbosa has the Pearl.  

All is not savvy in Sparrow’s crow’s nest right now, however; after Walt Disney Studios Chairman Dick Cook resigned this fall, Depp was pretty upset. Saying that Cook was the only person who really let him take the character Jack Sparrow where he wanted to go with him, Depp revealed that “there’s a fissure, a crack in my enthusiasm at the moment. It was all born in that office.”

Without Depp’s enthusiasm and the presence of hotties Knightly and Bloom, will the pirate flags still sail? Probably not. If Disney is hoping to keep this franchise going as the mega money magnet it’s been, they’re going to have to keep Jack Sparrow at the helm of the ship—and Johnny Depp playing that role. My guess is that with Cook gone, the newbies in charge are going to have to learn to work with Depp and accept his Tim Burton-like eccentricities, or send the series down the way of Davy Jones’ locker.