Indiana Jones and the Timid Mouse

When a digitally de-aged Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) shows up in the prologue of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, there’s an element of wishful thinking. What if we had gotten this Indiana Jones movie? What if Harrison Ford had never aged? What if, instead of three Indiana Jones movies made during the 1980s, the studio (Paramount, at the time) had the current business model where you put a character in as many movies as possible? Oh, what a sight to see!

Instead, you have a weird digital facsimile of Indiana Jones running around, and also when he talks he doesn’t sound quite like Indiana Jones because Harrison Ford in his 80s doesn’t sound like Harrison Ford in his 40s. But Indiana Jones must return because…why, exactly?

For Disney, the studio that now owns Lucasfilm and therefore owns Indiana Jones, it’s because he’s valuable intellectual property. You can’t recast the role while Harrison Ford lives because fans would revolt, but you can’t sit idle because shareholders don’t see the point in letting IP lay dormant for artistic reasons. You may not have an Indiana Jones story to tell, but he’s got to come off the shelf and go on an another adventure even if the time for Indiana Jones—or at least the Indiana Jones played by Harrison Ford—has long since passed.

Some look at Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and see a fitting swan song for the character, and for those who like the new movie, more power to you. For me, the film exemplifies a studio that simply cannot move forward even when a plum opportunity for something new and exciting is staring them right in the face.

An Analog Man in a Digital Time

Indiana Jones, like Star Wars, came out of producer George Lucas’ love for serials of the 1930s and 40s. Whereas Star Wars allowed Lucas to take science fiction and update it with cutting-edge visual VFX that changed filmmaking, Indiana Jones has always been, by his very nature, more tactile. He comes out of adventure stories, and as an archeologist, he’s literally got his hands in the dirt. While no one would necessarily qualify Jones as a luddite, the first three movies constantly eschew the future because Jones cares about the past. He doesn’t have the latest technology, and wouldn’t have any use for it if he did.

While the movies aren’t short on special effects, they’re far more practical with digital wizardry, which is rarely used if at all. But that was the 1980s when digital effects were still in short supply. Cut forward to 2008 and digital effects are all over the place in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. They’re used even more heavily in Dial of Destiny, and it all creates a weird dissonance with its central figure and what he’s about. Star Wars can always use the latest VFX because that’s part of the series’ DNA. For Indiana Jones, it only accentuates how far behind we’ve left this character and what he cares about.

You would think that might work for Dial of Destiny where we see an old Indiana Jones no longer sure about his place in a world where we’re about to land on the moon, but since the film opens with a heavily digitized 1945 where you have a CGI-faced Indiana Jones running atop a train against a CGI background, the only difference becomes when they’ll use the real Harrison Ford or if they’ll put a CGI mask on him for things the elder Ford may struggle with like strenuous horseback riding. Rather than getting back to the roots of the series or emphasizing what makes Indiana Jones unique, Dial of Destiny subsumes him into the digital landscape that all blockbusters inhabit these days.

This makes the film feel like it’s fighting a losing battle since it can surround Indiana Jones with signifiers (hat, whip, John Williams score, etc.), but his significance pales in comparison to what surrounds him in terms of the digital wizardry and the franchise demands of asking an 80-year-old man to be an action hero even though we do not ask this of any other 80-year-old actor. We let them age and do other things, and Dial of Destiny tries to thread the needle by acknowledging Ford’s age but also arguing that he’s still got it over forty years after his first movie. While Hollywood has never been comfortable with the concept of people aging, Dial of Destiny assumes that the audience also can’t let go of Indiana Jones, or at least that his specific style of adventuring only works with Harrison Ford wielding a whip and a fedora.

This notion—that it’s Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones or nothing—becomes even stranger when you put him next to an exciting new character that could lead her own franchise.

Helena Shaw and the Supporting Role

In Dial of Destiny, Indiana Jones teams up with his goddaughter, Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), to track down the eponymous Dial of Destiny (or, as they call it in the film, the Antikythera, which is good way to not have them say something silly like “Dial of Destiny” but also you can’t put “Indiana Jones and the Antikythera” on a poster). Helena is far more in the “fortune and glory” mold of Indiana Jones in the prequel Temple of Doom. She even has her own young sidekick (Ethann Isidore) a la Short Round (Ke Huy Quan).

And yet thanks to Waller-Bridge’s performance, she doesn’t feel like an Indiana Jones knockoff. There also doesn’t feel like a clumsy attempt to “hand her” the franchise like an understudy in waiting, which is how Shia LaBeouf’s Mutt came off in Crystal Skull. She feels like a descendant of Indiana Jones without being an imitation of Indiana Jones. She’s a woman in the 1960s with a similar backstory to Indy (her father was also obsessed with a particular artifact, but that didn’t lead to their reconciliation like it does with Indy and his dad in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), and yet a different attitude that makes her a far more exciting addition than LaBeouf attempting a Marlon-Brando-in-The-Wild-One look.

So why not just make the movie about Helena Shaw? If Indiana Jones doesn’t fit due to both Ford’s age and our current VFX-riddled landscape, wouldn’t it simply be better and more liberating to simply tell audiences, “Hey! We have a new adventure movie starring the critically acclaimed and beloved star of Fleabag! It’s inspired by Indiana Jones!” But for a movie studio, a new character—one who doesn’t come out of an earlier movie or a book or video game or something that independently created a following—is not worth the risk.

Disney’s Doldrums

On the one hand, you could look at Disney’s size and argue that their strategy of not doing anything new or daring has worked out pretty well for them. They bought name-brand companies (Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm) and told them to make more of the thing they were already making. This ballooned Disney to the size where they could buy 20th Century Fox and then try to get them to start making more franchise movies, which would then be dumped on streaming services (the fate of the excellent Prey, a film that came out of the Predator franchise). And yet all this led to was wild over-expansion, a leadership crisis that forced out Bob Chapek and had the board running back to former CEO Bob Iger1 only to still lay off 7,000 people. If the approach of only using IP for sequels and remakes is deemed “success,” I’d hate to see what failure looks like.

Obviously, for businessmen like Iger, they see their job as minimizing risk and maximizing value. Indiana Jones theoretically has a value since previous films in the series have been hits at the box office whereas asking audiences to roll the dice on a new character like Helena Shaw carries risk (of course, risks can pay off if you don’t overextend yourself and thoughtfully execute your premise like the John Wick series). Maybe you can’t get audiences to turn out for a Helena Shaw movie, but looking at this weekend’s box office, you had a lot of trouble turning them out for Indiana Jones.

All studios are engaging in this meek franchising right now, but for Disney it is completely their identity. It is a recycling factory of diminishing returns, and you can see that in box office returns as well. Dial of Destiny is going to open to about $40 million less than Crystal Skull. The Little Mermaid live-action remake did okay, but it’s not going to come anywhere close to the $1 billion worldwide the live-action versions of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King made. You can blame some of that on a more competitive streaming landscape post-pandemic, but whose fault is that? Studios have effectively cannibalized their own product by taking films out of theaters and into homes so fast that they’ve neutralized the incentive to get to the theater in the first place. As an audience member, you’ve effectively incentivized me to stay home since I can pay less money and see a film from the comfort of my couch rather than give you the box office power to demonstrate that your film is a hit.

Trotting out a fifth Indiana Jones movie is the appearance of corporate responsibility without actually doing things that would matter to the studio’s long-term health. It’s not that a fifth Indiana Jones movie was inherently a bad idea, but the film director James Mangold made shows all of its limitations as well as the possibilities that the studio refused to take. I understand why studios think that audiences will accept endless repackaging of the same material. You could even argue that’s what Indiana Jones was in the first place—a repackaged version of the 1930s and 40s adventure serials that Lucas and Spielberg loved. But they were smart enough to see the creative potential of inspiration rather than locking into a specific character and world.

What studio heads fail to see right now is that there is always risk, and simply relying on familiar IP isn’t going to make the entertainment landscape any less volatile. In a time of upheaval, now is the time to start taking chances and mapping out a new future rather than, like the villain of Dial of Destiny, hoping to return to the past.