Production design costs a lot. The ships, not just inside but outside - all that requires many man-hours of exacting, specialized union labor. Not to mention water tanks in a sound stage with gimbal mounted ship replicas, and a lot of explosion effects.

I just thought it was crazy that the budget was nearly on par as one of those green screen flicks like Star Wars or a Marvel film. I always thought they simply rented one of these ships from a collector and shot the majority of it from there. Of course, as you mentioned certain shots where the ship is getting splintered would obviously be a set.

Oh, they had plenty of bluescreen work in this:

https://youtu.be/xz1Ev0WBTPU

And, no these ships don't just exist in someones warehouse, especially when you need multiple ships to blow up, haha.

@MongoLloyd said:

Oh, they had plenty of bluescreen work in this:

https://youtu.be/xz1Ev0WBTPU

And, no these ships don't just exist in someones warehouse, especially when you need multiple ships to blow up, haha.

Actually there are plenty of collectors of seaworthy replicas out there:

http://artdaily.com/news/87579/Life-size-replica-of-18th-century-ship-is-up-for-sale#.W_L-SZNKiM8

I just thought they rented those for most of the outdoor scenes.

No, there actually aren't, especially when they need to blow them up and set them on fire. You can't rent a rare replica for destructive use.

How it used to be done, scale models were built for the wide shots of the ship on the water but I'd guess those are CGI now. Otherwise, various full scale partial builds are made as needed for various scenes.

Yeah, I excluded the blowing up scenes. But it does look from that link you gave me they simply built their own replicas. But in the tight shots it is more feasible to only build a small section of a ship to shown being blown up.