Orlando Bloom well remembers his first encounter with pirates. "When I was a kid, pirate movies used to be on TV on Sunday afternoons. You'd come in from the garden and see Errol Flynn," recalls the British actor best known for playing archer Legolas in The Lord Of The Rings movies.

What a young actor like Bloom could never have anticipated was having the chance to emulate his swashbuckling heroes. The most recent pirate adventures have sunk without trace, seemingly scuppering future seaborne movies.

A decade ago, big budget flop Cutthroat Island, with Geena Davis as a female pirate, sent the genre straight to Davy Jones's locker. It's taken a Hollywood producer of the standing of Jerry Bruckheimer, responsible for some of the biggest action adventures ever, to set sail in the choppy waters to revive the cut-and-thrust of the buccaneers.

"That's the reason I felt it was exciting - because pirate movies hadn't worked for many years," he explains, following the European premiere of Pirates Of The Caribbean in London this week.

"We did Flashdance when people said musicals wouldn't work, and Top Gun when they said aviator films didn't do well. I was told when I did Beverley Hills Cop that no movie starring an Afro-American could gross ten or 12 million dollars. We did 234 million. Those sort of challenges really excite me."

His knack for picking a hit has paid off again, with Pirates box office treasure totalling $70m after five days of US release. A sequel is already in the works, and its success will undoubtedly lead to a rash of pirate movies from other producers.

Coupled with the release of the new animated feature Sinbad: Legend Of The Seven Seas, the signs are that film-makers are preparing to hit the high seas ago.

BrUckheimer didn't weigh anchor without a lifebelt of sorts. Naming the film after a Disneyland theme ride meant audiences had a brandname they could recognise. The writers - the same duo behind CGI hit Shrek - retained the swashbuckling, yo-ho-ho of the pirate classics and put a contemporary spin on it. These pirates are under a curse that turns them into skeletons in moonlight, and, instead of stealing the treasure, must return it to lift the curse.

Star Johnny Depp knew the risks. "The pirate movie got a bum rap for a number of years for some reason," he says. "Maybe the more recent ones were no good, that's why they didn't work."

He views pirates as "the rock and roll stars of the 18th century", drawing much of the inspiration for his performance as Captain Jack Sparrow from Rolling Stone Keith Richards.

Depp follows a long line of actors who've found their cinematic sea legs. Douglas Fairbanks Snr was one of the first in the 1926 silent movie The Black Pirate. Then, a decade later, Errol Flynn set the standard as Captain Blood.

Robert Donat was first choice, only to drop out and be replaced by the unknown 26-year-old Flynn. Despite inserting shots of ships from old silents and using miniature sets, Captain Blood is regarded as one of the best pirate movies ever made.

Flynn returned to sea in The Sea Hawk, set against the background of the Spanish Armada. Burt Lancaster showed off his acrobatic skills as the Crimson Pirate, while Tyrone Power played murderous buccaneer Henry Morgan in The Black Swan. There was no shortage of actors wanting to swash their buckle.

Producers plundered literature, finding gold with Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Screen versions now run into double figures, with the latest Disney feature-length cartoon Treasure Planet relocating the story in deep space. Long John Silver earned his own movie, and its star Robert Newton also played Blackbeard The Pirate.

Then audiences grew tired of pirates, preferring their heroes to be cops or spies, and on dry land. Car chases replaced sea battles, and guns were fired instead of cannons. The expense of filming at sea deterred the studios.

While actors are warned about acting with children and animals, directors should be wary of water movies. There appears to be a curse on them. The difficulty of filming at sea, where both weather and boats are unpredictable, is a real deterrent.

The debacle that was Kevin Costner's Waterworld showed just how much can go wrong, with the picture never overcoming stories surrounding trouble at sea during filming. Only occasionally, as with Steven Spielberg's Jaws, are the problems forgotten when the box-office returns are good.

A ship was built for Roman Polanski's long-cherished Pirates project, sailing into Cannes Film Festival to publicise the movie. More people probably saw the boat there than saw the flop movie starring Walter Matthau.

The genre was killed off by Cutthroat Island, in which Renny Harlin directed his then-wife Geena Davis. Little went according to plan. Michael Douglas pulled out shortly before shooting after discovering his role had been truncated, and a top league replacement couldn't be found. Harlin sacked Oliver Reed for dropping his trousers in front of Davis, before Harlin checked himself into a London clinic with nervous exhaustion.

After all the hassle, the film opened and closed in cinemas before you could say Captain Pugwash.

Current advances made in technology would have made Harlin's job much easier. Pirates Of The Caribbean director Gore Verbinski acknowledges that "everything they say is true about water in movies - nothing stays where you put it". He had the means of doing something about it.

"My approach was to keep shooting," he says. "If there's an oil tanker in the background, you know it's going to cost you an hour of shooting for the things to clear the frame," he says.

"It's either one man and a computer to paint it out, or 400 crew members on overtime. The movie has 700 visual effects shots, most of which were just to get rid of hotels or things in the back of shots."

The new Pirates movie had a link with the old pirate swashbucklers through getting swordsman Bob Anderson, the man who trained Errol Flynn, to help train the actors.

He says learning to be a pirate is not just about imitating the swagger and demeanour, but a serious study in brandishing a boarding cutlass or rapier.

"Swordplay is a conversation. The opponents talk to each other with their blades," he says.

"The style of fighting varies with each character. If I can make the swordwork talk about what's happening in the script in the same way the dialogue conveys the story, then I feel I've succeeded."

Anderson, a sword master for 50 years, says that pirate films are his favourite genre. At long last, cinema audiences may be coming round to that way of thinking again too.

* Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl (12A) opens in cinemas on August 8.

* Sinbad: Legend Of The Seven Seas (U) has advance screenings today and tomorrow, and opens on July 25.