Take “Pirates of the Caribbean.” You have this franchise that goes out, makes $3 billion in theaters, another couple billion in DVD and ancillary merchandise, and wouldn’t you know it? Suddenly, everybody wants to compare their new film to the series that launched a thousand Orlando Bloom fan pages. And in one case, they’d actually be right.

“Prince of Persia” isn’t just going to be like “Pirates” in terms of scope and tone, the newest Disney/Bruckheimer tag-team is actually going to “do for Arabian Nights movies what ‘Pirates’ did for pirate movies,” screenwriter and series creator Jordon Mechner told MTV News. Slated for 2010, the film will star Jake Gyllenhaal as the iconic video game character character.

“This is how we pitched it to Disney and Bruckheimer – as an old-fashioned swashbuckling action-adventure in a tradition going all the way back to the Doug Fairbanks movies. The modern equivalent being ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’ an example of an old movie made new again, doing a fresh take on it for a modern audience,” Mechner said. “Tonally, I’d say it’s basically ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ with maybe a half-step towards ‘Gladiator.’” Read more...