The summer blockbuster is back, and Hollywood is elated. Last weekend, Disney’s new Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, starring Johnny Depp as the louche Jack Sparrow, broke the opening weekend revenue record held by Spider-Man since 2002.

Never mind the lukewarm reviews. The very point of a summer blockbuster is to elude the critics and connect with audiences. What makes Pirates of the Caribbean unusual is that it seems to have connected, so far, with audiences of every kind. That has Hollywood crowing. So the summer of 2006 may go a long way in the film industry to undo the damage of the summer of 2005, which was devoid of entertainment and profit. The question is what you make of that turnaround.

Making movies is an art. Marketing them is a mystery. The success of the first Pirates of the Caribbean in 2003 took many people by surprise. The success of its sequel should surprise no one, even though it doesn’t come up to the standard of its predecessor. To girls of a certain age, and their mothers, the words “Johnny Depp” sound like an incantation, eye shadow or not. To all the rest of us, there’s an ironic detachment in Depp’s Jack Sparrow, a wink to the wise moviegoer that somehow fills theatres and, at the same time, sends up the whole of Hollywood’s efforts to understand its audience.