For Fans of Pirates of the Caribbean

Starz's Black Sails treats the pirates of Nassau with a seriousness that Pirates of the Caribbean deliberately avoids, yet the two properties share a common soul. Where POTC leans into theatrical fun, Black Sails builds out the political and personal machinery that makes piracy a genuine movement. Charles Vane, Flint, and Anne Bonny feel like the darker, morally complicated versions of characters who could have stepped off the Black Pearl. The show even threads Long John Silver's origin through its final season with remarkable care. Watch it after At World's End and the cynicism and idealism of both works reflect off each other.

Ubisoft's Black Flag was originally designed as an Assassin's Creed game but became something far more resonant: an open-ocean pirate simulation with one of the best maritime soundtracks in gaming. Edward Kenway is the franchise's most grounded protagonist, and his arc from mercenary to something approaching conscience mirrors Will Turner's journey more than most critics acknowledged at the time. The naval combat, the sea shanties that your crew learns and sings as you plunder, the sense of the Caribbean as a genuinely alive world: no other game has matched it. If you mourned the end of the Black Pearl trilogy, this is the place to spend another forty hours.

Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 novel didn't invent pirates, but it did invent almost every narrative convention we associate with them. The buried treasure, the one-legged antagonist with a parrot, the map with an X, the treacherous double-cross among cutthroats: all Stevenson. Jack Sparrow himself is a spiritual descendant of Long John Silver, a charming criminal whose self-interest and genuine affection make him impossible to fully hate. On Stranger Tides, the Tim Powers novel that lends its name to the fourth film, is also worth reading: it treats Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth as magic-realist history in a way the film only partially captured.

The Pirates of the Caribbean score by Hans Zimmer and Klaus Badelt established a template for blockbuster action music that dominated the decade that followed. The main theme, built on a relentless repeating motif for solo violin, became shorthand for adventure itself. Zimmer's expanded scoring on Dead Man's Chest and At World's End pushed into darker, stranger territory: the Davy Jones motif played on a clavichord is genuinely eerie, and the final battle score for At World's End remains one of his most ambitious sustained efforts. Film score fans who found this music will recognize the same DNA in Gladiator, The Last Samurai, and Zimmer's own catalogue of adventure epics.