Jerry Bruckheimer's seemingly uncanny sense of the public’s taste led to him being dubbed the “man with the golden gut” by The Washington Post and his hits include such movies as Top Gun, The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and National Treasure, and television shows CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Without a Trace and The Amazing Race.
Even by Bruckheimer’s blockbusting standards however, the Pirates of the Caribbean films are in a class of their own. The first film in the series, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, was generally regarded as a no-hoper before its release in the summer of 2003.
Yet it went on to be a huge, worldwide hit as well as a career-defining moment for star Johnny Depp who, in Captain Jack Sparrow, created the first cinematic icon of the new century.
Last year's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, with its giant squid and dreaded Davy Jones, went one better, and, with box-office takings in excess of $1 billion, became the third most successful film of all time.
The third film in the series, At World's End, takes Jack, Elizabeth and Will - aka Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom - into uncharted territories way beyond the Caribbean and reunites them with Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) and Commodore Norrington (Jack Davenport) among others.
The films also introduce new characters played by Chow Yun-Fat and Keith Richards. A good time will undoubtedly be had by all. In the meantime, Jerry Bruckheimer reflects on his remarkable winning streak.
The Curse of the Black Pearl was a big success, but Dead Man's Chest broke records. Does that raise the bar for the third film?
It's scary when you make a picture that's such a huge success. You never quite know.
It was against conventional wisdom that a pirate movie based on a theme park ride could be such a hit.
Then we came back with the second film, and it's common knowledge in our business that a sequel will make 20 to 30 per cent less than the first one.
And yet Dead Man's Chest made almost double the final figure for The Curse of the Black Pearl. Does that raise expectations even more for the third film? I don't know, but I certainly wouldn't like to predict what it's going to do.
You have a Chinese pirate in At World's End named Sao Feng. Was that just an excuse to hire Chow Yun-Fat?
There are a group of pirate lords from all over the world in this film, so the character wasn't invented for the sake of hiring a particular actor, no.
But any time you make a film you want to hire enormously talented actors who are at the top of their game, and that's the definition of Chow Yun-Fat. He's a masterful actor, an international star, and a perfect addition to the trilogy.
You also have Keith Richards playing Jack Sparrow's father. Was it hard to persuade him to do the role?
The hardest part was trying to fit our film schedule into his touring schedule, so we had to find about three or four days when the Rolling Stones weren't touring. But I think he was happy to be part of the film.
You made Dead Man's Chest and At World's End back to back and over a period of almost two years. Isn't making one movie at a time bad enough?
It certainly wasn't easy (laughs). We had a lot of weather problems, we had hurricanes, we had storms, we were on very remote islands, but there's no way round that when you make a movie on this scale.
And from the producer's point of view it was the only way to make the second and third films. You have Gore Verbinski, who is a directing star based on the first movie and his other work. 
You have Johnny Depp, who has been a star for years, but who broke out into a huge, mainstream audience on The Curse of the Black Pearl. You have Orlando Bloom, who blossomed even before the first Pirates, and became a superstar after it was released.
And then you have Keira Knightley, who’s really come into her own as a phenomenal young actress. To get all of them together for two movies, if you did it separately there would be three or four years in between before you could figure out their schedules and make all of their deals.
Blocking out their time based on two back-to-back movies, as well as keeping the rest of the crew together, meant that this was the only way to go.