After helping to bankrupt an entire studio, it’s completely understandable why the pirate genre was forced to walk the Hollywood plank in the aftermath of Cutthroat Island. Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl may have rejuvenated swashbuckling tales of adventure less than a decade later, but the track record as a whole remains spotty, and that’s without counting Jack Sparrow’s succession of inferior sequels.
Disney’s Treasure Planet flopped hard, as did Joe Wright’s Pan, but Aardman Animations’ The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! was a critical and commercial success story. 2014’s Korean effort The Pirates ended up flying almost completely under the radar, but standalone successor The Last Royal Treasure has become an unqualified success on Netflix.
As per FlixPatrol, since being added to the platform’s library four days ago, Kim Jeong-hoon’s old school seafaring epic has become an international phenomenon. It can be found as the third most-watched title on the global viewership charts at the time of writing, after managing to attain Top 10 status in no less than 74 nations, not bad for a film that only hit local theaters at the end of January.
Like most movies of a similar ilk, The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure focuses on the hunt for treasure, with a gutsy band of pirates battling against bandits, rebels, thugs, and each other in an effort to get their hands on a bounty of royal gold that was thought to be lost at sea. Korean content is massively popular on Netflix right now, so the latest blockbuster hailing from the country was always in with a shout at success.