Devils of the Caribbean

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"Certainly we realized very early in production that Devils of the Caribbean would not be the ideal experience for everyone. But for those who want a fun, exciting, and lighthearted look at the Golden Age of Piracy, their ship has come to port."

―Helix Team Virtual Entertainment eXposition (VEX) Press Training document, 2014.

Devils of the Caribbean

Devils of the Caribbean was a 2014 feature film made by Abstergo Entertainment using doctored footage sourced from the pirate Edward Kenway's genetic memories, though it was considered a box-office bomb. Nearly a century later, Abstergo found it had endured severe data degradation and attempted to salvage it through generative AI, re-releasing the film as a virtual reality experience, but despite a wide-reaching and costly marketing campaign, it performed even worse than before.

History

In 2014, Abstergo Industries' multimedia subsidiary Abstergo Entertainment hired an research analyst to work on the Sample 17 Project and look for historical material in the late Desmond Miles' genetic ancestry to create marketable material. Seeing a potential lead in Kenway's life during the Golden Age of Piracy, Entertainment's CCO Olivier Garneau tasked the analyst with reliving his life in the Animus Omega and recording their findings for Abstergo to clean up for public release. However, as with the company's video games Pirates of Nightmares (2013) and Liberation (2012), the final product was heavily censored and modified, omitting all traces of the Assassins or the Observatory from Kenway's recovered memories. Devils fared poorly upon release, with even internal Abstergo training documents forced to admit that it was "a frightful mess of clichés, dime-store moralizing, and pandering stereotypes".

By the 2090s, the film poster's image file, its trailer video file, and the movie itself had all digitally deteriorated so much that Abstergo tried to restore them by running the few surviving parts through generative AI and re-released it as "The Devils of the Caribbean", which they billed as a dystopian VR thriller. Rumored to have a $1.5 billion budget, a leaked company document gave some credence to this theory by revealing that Abstergo allotted $100 million for an intrusive, global publicity campaign targeting the youth demographic. It detailed how the company would hijack VR and Animus users' sessions with short, unskippable Devils ads; hire expensive internet personalities and virtual influencers to promote the film with ad reaction videos; post interactive Devils-themed memes artificially induced for virality in the metaverse and social media platforms; open a VR filmography contest whose winners would cameo in a presumed sequel; and contract an industry plant to make a Devils-themed single, the music video of which would feature film scenes.

However, despite all these promotions, the AI-spawned film was nowhere near close to what had first been made, going so far as to wholly alter scenes and replace Adéwalé with an Irishwoman original character as the Jackdaw's quartermaster, and the film was critically panned even worse than the original. An aggregate review said it felt like bad corporate fanfiction made as a "soulless cash grab" due to its overdone tropes, a barely sensible plot, lackluster voice-acting by the entire cast, and inexplicably poor CGI more akin to early 2000s gaming consoles than contemporary big-budget films. It ultimately deemed the whole thing "an overwrought, incoherent slog", and suggested that readers watch the original instead, as bad as it also was.

Gallery

• Teaser
  Teaser

Behind the scenes

The film's title is a clear reference to the Disney film series Pirates of the Caribbean.

Appearances

• Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (first appearance)
• Assassin's Creed: Unity (mentioned only) (mentioned in Database entry only)
• Animus Hub