Said by a local news reporter
“The Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy skyrocketed Johnny Depp into stardom”
If you don’t count Edward Scissorhands, Arizona Dream, Benny and Joon, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Ed Wood, Donnie Brasco, Fear and Loathing, Astronauts Wife, Sleepy Hallow, From Hell, Chocolat and Blow, then yeah, I guess so
I’d like to add that even if Blow was the first movie he ever made, her statement still woundn’t be true,
I think he certainly had a much higher profile leading up to, and immediately after, the release of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie than before. Wouldn’t you say?
My objection to that statement lies solely in the fact that ‘skyrocket’ is an intransitive verb – nothing can skyrocket anyone into anything.
I would.
This type of statement is typical of TV reporter types. I’ve seen it many times on mainstream british TV. A star gets mentioned who you immediately know of from something of quality… and they refer to her/him in reference to some box office crap they let their name get attached to in some instance of temporary insanity.
Would you say he wasn’t a movie star before them though?
He received his Walk Of Fame star in 1999, four years before the first Pirates movie came out.
The pirates movie may have made him a HUGE star, but he was a star to begin with. I guess I’ll accept that maybe he was under rated/appriciated to begin with and this just made him about 10 times more mainstream, being a family movie and all.
He may have been a “star”, but he wasn’t a People-magazine-comes-in-their-pants star–until after Pirates. Then you started seeing him all over the place; indeed, you couldn’t stand in line at Kroger without seeing him all over the tabloids. Blow or Ed Wood didn’t do that–Pirates did.
Pirates also brought us the mass market Wal-Mart Johnny Depp poster.
He’s been a star for me ever since 21 Jump Street! 
Gimmie enough of 'em and a few rolls of duct tape, and I’ll send anything anywhere…
Depp was a star waaaay before Pirates. Hell, he was one of the reasons I thought I’d see the first flick, well before word-of-mouth really ramped up for it.
This is what I thought was the point of the OP.
I would assume that’s what the reporter meant. It was in Stupid rather than English, but most news programs are anyway.
He was in Pirates? And he came in his pants? The poor guy!
He was already a “movie star,” certainly, a successful film actor both commercially and artistically. He was also already well regarded as eye candy (he was a favorite of my wife’s long before Pirates). He had never been a “superstar,” though in the Tom Cruise, Will Smith, tent pole sense of the word. His movies tended to do ok but they weren’t blockbusters. That was largely because Depp, for years, avoiding doing the popcorn movies, formulaic romantic comedies and similarly commercial fare to do more offbeat and commercially rewarding stuff like the Tim Burton movies, Donnie Brascoe, Blow and a lot of independent stuff as well (If you’ve never seen Dead man, check it out. It’s a strange, dark humored western, little known but great. The scene with Billy Bob Thornton and Iggy Pop alone is worth the rental price).
I guess Depp has always had all the ingredients to be a mega-star (looks, talent, range, versatilty), but it wasn’t until POTC that he ever made the effort to move into super-commercial territory. I don’t know why he did it. Maybe he liked the script. Whatever his reasons were, I think he carried what would have been an otherwise mediocre action movie with his eccentric, original and totally endearing take on (from what I understand) had originally been written as a much more conventional action hero.
So he did go from one tier of stardom to another, but yeah, he was already pretty far up there.
Thats what I always think of when ever I hear his name.
That’s only because there Wal*Mart wasn’t really a national chain during the “21 Jump Street” years.
POTC just gave him a new generation.
Given that these days the stars (or their publicists) apply to be so honored, and pay for the actual stars, this isn’t exactly an objective criterion.
I think of POTC as “those kids movies that Johnny Depp is in”. I recently watched Dead Man it’s a great movie. Wasn’t he in the first Nightmare on Elmstreet? If that doesn’t put you in the superstar category nothing will.
His IMDB page says he’s going to be in Sin City 2 & 3 already in production. Sweet!
My favorite Johnny Depp movie isn’t even listed here. I doubt a lot of people have seen it. “Secret Window” rocked.
Of these, only Sleepy Hollow broke 100 million dollars in box office and that one just barely.
The first pirates broke 300 million dollars and made him a world wide star.
No, it has both a transitive and intransitive definitions.
Exactly. The OP quote might’ve indulged in a bit of hyperbole, but it actually wasn’t far off the mark. More people knew who Depp was than had actually seen more than 1 or 2 of his films. And none of those movies listed in that postscript made any real impression overseas. He was famous pre-PotC, but being famous and being a star (a film personality people actually gravitate towars) are two different things.