Okay, I have put way too much thought into to this and after reading this whole thread (except the parts where you were killing people, making a time machine, drinking rum, etc) I came up with this.
Barbossa probably took him out to the middle of the ocean where there’s no land for miles, tied his hands behind his back, strapped a cannon to his bootstraps and threw him over.
So the real question is, can a pirate take off his boots with his hands tied behind his back and a cannon tied to his bootstraps.
If he didn’t get free of the cannon before he reached the bottom, then (as the writers say in the commentary) he was a living puddle at the bottom of the ocean for 10 years and died when the curse was broken.
I don’t care what anyone says because if you are a puddle, even a cursed one, you can’t move, let alone swim to shore. The curse didn’t stopped him from getting crushed, and it didn’t make him able go back to his normal form after being flattened like a pancake. He actually would be worse than dead, so if Will killed him he had done him a favor.
(By the way, the same would go for if one of them were to be blown up like when Will put the bomb in the one guys stomach. He would go to pieces. Now the pieces wouldn’t be ably to go back together any more than if he were dead, but the pieces would be alive and moving, although useless in a fight. And the only reason Will pushed him out of the moonlight after inserting the bomb was so it would have been covered by skin and couldn’t be taken out.)
Now even if he had gotten free of the cannon, he would be in the middle of the ocean, no land around for miles. Most likely the only chance he would have was if he was picked up by a passing boat.
And If he is still alive, I think he would come back in the second movie. Because he would probably want to get to his son as soon as the curse was broken.
Well, anyway, that’s my opinion.
Oh, I forgot to add something, in the writers commentary during the credits they explain that Bootstrap sent Will off with the gold to a merchant ship, the movie starts 2 years later when the East India Company finds him floating on the piece of wood. The rest of the movie (when Will and Elizabeth are in their 20s or so) happened 8 years after the beginning of the movie.
I think that’s all I wanted to say. So do you agree with me or did I make a mistake?
yes i agree...i think that if he was alive when the cruse was still around he would probably come back in the second movie. but you are right on the second point...just being droped that far would totally ruin and crush your insides leaving you with no possible way to live even if you were under a curse