There's a couple of wild rumours floating around the Internet that Disney is in fact planning for Pirates of the Caribbean in 2011, I know it's a long way off, but the talk is that the film is on Disney's slate.

However there seem to be conflicting reports of how the fourth Pirates film is going to go, and neither sounds very promising.

The first is that there's going to be serious downsizing on the film's story and that the budget will be dramatically reduced and the plot will be much smaller than the sprawling epic and effects heavy predecessors.

The other rumour is that that story is actually going to expand from the third - I initially wondered how they could possibly make it bigger - then AICN through Moviehole came out with the words to describe the idea - dinosaurs, Jules Verne, floating fortresses...Now you're getting it, bigger and better.

I guess it's a difficult choice, what do they do? Do they make it bigger following the previous films, or do they downscale and maximise the profits, concentrating instead on the characters?

Well I think the answer is obvious, the commentary for the films has been dropping, see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Filmstalker review), particularly with the third. The love of the series is about the characters and the interplay, and trying to step it up another notch and do more effects with bigger set pieces is going to yield less time on the characters and more complicated, poorly handled plots such as that of Tia and her ultimate fate.

We've heard about the ideas behind a fourth film before:

"For a start it does look like both Elizabeth and Will are out of the story. That's no surprise considering where the previous one left off, their fate was pretty much sealed. However I thought that perhaps Will would be the hero to return with the magical ship and crew to help save the day in the next one, but perhaps not. Thankfully though, there's no son story being talked of yet...

...There's talk of the fountain of youth, as well as discussion of flying machines rather than ships, of Atlantis, and of Jules Verne. You can read the scoopers quote over there, but frankly I'm looking at this with sceptical eyes."

It's rumour from a pesky "inside scooper", and so we'll have to wait for more, but for now it seems plausible that they would consider another film, after all the buzz is still high for it - we just have to hope that they turn to the characters and get the original actors back again, many of whom are saying they're done with the series. Perhaps that's another reason they need to downscale, to pay the wage bill.