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Variety confirms the involvement of Geoffrey Rush in the fourth Pirates movie. The British actor is returning to don the hat of Captain Hector Barbossa in On Stranger Tides. Filming is scheduled to begin on Pirates of the Caribbean 4 later this month in Hawaii.

Nearly one year to the day of the movie's future release date, Walt Disney Pictures has announced that the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie will be filmed in Disney Digital 3D.

Disney has announced that 24-year-old British actor Sam Claflin has been added to the film's cast. He will play a new character called Philip, a missionary.

A graduate of The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Claflin has appeared in the TV series The Pillars of the Earth and the telefilm The Lost Future.

The youthful French actress by the name of Astrid Bergès-Frisbey has won the role of Syrena in the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Described by Disney as a "beautiful and alluring mermaid", On Stranger Tides will film entirely on location in Hawaii, Great Britain and Los Angeles.

Bergès-Frisbey was born in Barcelona of French-American and Catalan parentage. She's starred in such French films as La Fille du Puisatier, Bruc, Extase, La Premiere Etoile and Un Barrage Contre le Pacifique.

Stephen Graham has landed a supporting role in Pirates 4 playing a character named Scram. Graham's been working in show business for three decades, starring in such movies as Snatch, Gangs of New York, The Damned United and the upcoming Season of the Witch.

Ian McShane (Deadwood, the remake of Death Race) is now in talks to play the most infamous pirate of them all, Blackbeard, in the movie.

Penelope Cruz is in talks to join the new Pirates of the Caribbean film. Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision Blog broke the news, adding that the Nine actress' character is surmised to be "Jack Sparrow's foil and equal in many ways."

Today Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle made the announcement that the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie will lens in Oahu and Kauai this coming summer. The Disney production will pumo about $85 million dollars into the Hawaiian economy.

The uncertainty of Sony Pictures over whether Spider-Man 4 will be in production in time to meet its May 5, 2011 release date has caused the repositioning of two rival studios films. When Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment decided to be brave and bump up the opening date of Thor to the day after Spider-Man 4 (Friday, May 6, 2011), Disney swiftly followed and Pirates 4 took over Thor's old opening date of May 20, 2011. Poor Spidey is looking like he won't have a May opening at all.

Could the storyline for Pirates of the Caribbean 4 be based in part on a 1988 fantasy novel called On Stranger Tides? The evidence leads one to believe that it is.

First, the facts: in 1988 On Stranger Tides was published. Written by Tim Powers, the book is a fantasy adventure set in the world of pirates and, most interestingly, the Fountain of Youth. Here is the book's plot as described in its Wikipedia entry:

"The book follows the exploits of John 'Jack Shandy' Chandagnac, who travels to the new world after the death of his puppeteer father to confront his uncle, who apparently has made off with the family inheritance. During the voyage, he gets to know a woman named Beth Hurwood and her father, an Oxford professor. Before they arrive, their ship is waylaid by pirates and, with the help of the professor and his assistant, the captain is killed and Chandagnac is forced to join the pirate crew. The reader discovers a sinister plot being concocted by the professor involving his dead wife, his living daughter and Blackbeard Chandagnac, now known as 'Jack Shandy', must put a stop to these plans and save Beth Hurwood."

A quest for the Fountain of Youth was mentioned at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, and if the fourth Pirates does keep that promised premise as its storyline then it's quite unusual that the movie's subtitle is the same as a pirate story involving the same quest, don't you think?

Latino Review certainly thought so and they set out to contact Powers' literary agent to discover if there was a connection. The answer they got back was most intriguing: as the site quoted the agent directly, "I can tell you it is not a coincidence."

Albeit it's unusual for Hollywood to base a movie sequel on a stand-alone novel's premise, it has happened before on occasion. For example, the novel 58 Minutes was used as the premise for Die Hard 2: Die Harder.

On the second day of Disney's inaugural D23 convention in Los Angeles, President Dick Cook and star Johnny Depp made the announcement that the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie will come out in the summer of 2011 and be subtitled On Stranger Tides. Depp was in character as Jack Sparrow during the announcement. Story details are still being kept a secret.

Disney sent us over the title artwork for the movie.

Over at his blog Jeffrey Wells drops a story about what he heard Pirates 4 will contain. The info comes from a source he knows who mentions that Captain Jack and others will be setting off on a search for the Fountain of Youth. While that info isn't new, what is fresh is the mention that "there will also be some kind of Captain Nemo-type villain utilizing new-style technology."

Disney has a new 20,000 Leagues movie in development that would use Captain Nemo as its central character. Is it possible Wells' source got their wires crossed between the two Disney projects or is the house of mouse planning on using a Captain Nemo-esque character for the new Pirates?

Disney is in serious discussions with Chicago and Memoirs of a Geisha director Rob Marshall to step onboard the Black Pearl and helm the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Variety's moles state that it's looking pretty certain that the studio and Marshall are going to work something out, to the point that Disney is now starting to consider actors for the new characters in the Pirates 4 screenplay.

Speaking with Walt Disney Pictures' president of production Oren Aviv at Comic-Con 2009, Coming Soon was told that the company's current plan is to begin filming on the fourth Pirates movie in April or May of 2010. "We are going to release it hopefully in 2011 is the plan," Aviv told the site.

While Aviv said that they hope that the next movie will be the first in another successful trilogy of Pirates films, "It's important to get the story right and it's important to me to scale it down, because we can't get bigger," Aviv added. "The movies have subsequently gotten bigger and bigger and very complicated and they were satisfying on so many levels obviously, but I want to kind of reboot the whole thing and bring it down to its core, its essence, just characters."

Speaking with HitFix, producer Jerry Bruckheimer spread the inside word that Disney wants to make a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie before doing The Lone Ranger movie. Both films have attracted the interest of Johnny Depp, with the Captain Jack actor interested in playing the role of Tonto in Ranger. "Disney's priority is to get Pirates [4] made," Bruckheimer is quoted as saying. [Full story]