100 years ago, a perfect pirate movie pushed technology to its limits — and changed Hollywood forever

That thing where a guy slides down a sail using a knife? That's one century old Hollywood has long held a love-hate relationship with the spectacle, pageantry, and potential boondoggle represented by pirate movies. It’s an attraction and sometime repulsion perfectly befitting the antiheroic romance of pirate characters, right down to the fortunes that can be plundered and lost over the course of an adventure. This dynamic stretches almost as far back as commercial cinema itself, and one of the most notable movies in this subgenre of action-adventure has just turned 100 years old. Even a century after is release on March 8, 2026 The Black Pirate remains an enduring example of why it takes more than a Cutthroat Island-sized bomb or later-period Pirates of the Caribbean-style diminishing returns to dissuade studios from returning to the high seas. No offense to those Pirates of the Caribbean movies — particularly the eye-filling, Terry Gilliam-influenced muchness of the Gore Verbinski ones — but The Black Pirate keeps its story gratifyingly simple. After a vicious pirate attack on a ship, an initially unnamed survivor (original Zorro actor Douglas Fairbanks) washes up on an island and