Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is a 2006 American fantasy adventure film directed by Gore Verbinski, the second installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Captain Jack Sparrow discovers that his debt to the supernatural Davy Jones, captain of the Flying Dutchman, has come due — Jones demands Jack's soul, and unless he can find the legendary Dead Man's Chest containing Jones's still-beating heart, he will be condemned to an eternity of servitude aboard the ghost ship. Meanwhile, Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann find their wedding interrupted by arrest warrants, forcing them into an uneasy alliance with Jack as they navigate treacherous waters filled with sea monsters, cannibal tribes, and the horrifying kraken.

Dead Man's Chest was filmed simultaneously with the third installment, At World's End, in an ambitious and grueling production schedule that took cast and crew across multiple Caribbean islands and the Bahamas. Bill Nighy's performance as Davy Jones, brought to life through groundbreaking motion-capture technology by Industrial Light & Magic, was one of the most impressive digital characters created at that time — his tentacled face, barnacle-encrusted skin, and expressive crab-claw hand were achieved through capturing Nighy's subtle facial performance and translating it into the CGI character. The film earned $1.07 billion worldwide, becoming only the third film in history to cross the billion-dollar mark and the fastest to reach that milestone at the time.

The kraken attack sequence and the three-way sword fight atop a rolling water wheel were praised as some of the most inventive action set pieces in modern blockbuster cinema. The film ended on a dramatic cliffhanger that generated enormous anticipation for the trilogy's conclusion.