Pieces Of Eight

Timbers are well and truly shivering at 20th Century Fox this week after Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl plundered the US box office for all it was worth and gained $46.4 million over the weekend. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen failed to compete, taking second place with $23.3 million as Sean Connery's band of mis-matched literary heroes set out to save the world and Terminator 3 rather aptly took third. "There are a lot of people in this business who thought you couldn't do a successful pirates movie," A Disney spokesman told Variety. "(But) every now and then you get a piece of original programming." Yes, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the presence of Orlando Bloom, a heavily mascara'd Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley in a corset. Nope, nothing at all.