Indiana Jones and the Death of Nostalgia Porn
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Disney, 2023).
By Nick M.W.
The new Indy flick is the end of an era and another warning shot to Hollywood executives searching for box office treasure in old IP.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Harrison Ford’s swan song as the beloved professor of archaeology and heroic puncher of Nazis, failed to spark at the box office over the 4th of July weekend. It needed big numbers to justify the astronomical price it cost to make this movie—and worth the money they spent on de-aging Harrison Ford for the opening sequence. I hope those 100 artists at Industrial Light and Magic who worked on that project were well paid because what they accomplished is remarkable. It’s a shame more people didn’t see it in the theater.
I enjoyed this final Indy flick; it was good but definitely not great. Saying it was better than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull doesn’t do much to move the needle, but I had a good time with it, and it seemed like the other folks in the smaller-but-full auditorium also enjoyed it, too.
To my surprise, my 10-year-old daughter wanted to see it, so we watched the previous four in the couple of weeks leading up to Dial of Destiny. Now, it’s only fair to point out that my daughter has questionable taste. She likes Indiana Jones. Good stuff, but Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is her favorite installment. Yikes! So, when I tell you that she liked Dial of Destiny, take it with a grain of salt. The fact that she enjoyed this movie weighed slightly on my impression of it because it reminded me of myself as a kid her age watching them. Back then, my favorite Indiana Jones movie was Temple of Doom. After watching it a week ago, turns out that it still is, so take this with a grain of salt: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a pleasant farewell trip down familiar streets and familiar beats with a familiar face that they worked really, really hard to make even more familiar to the folks who remember what Indy looked like in our childhood dreams.
That, folks, is a big problem.
De-aged Indy blending in with the Nazis in 1944. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Disney, 2023).
With the end of this franchise and the aging of our greatest movie stars, perhaps the last couple generations of great actors, what will movie studios bank on in the next decade? I suppose we’re already seeing some of it be produced. Warner Bros. is banking on James Gunn’s reset of the wobbly DC universe. It was only a decade ago when they rebooted Superman IP, and much more recent than that since Henry Cavill last played that hero, but that vehicle for cash is already getting a fresh coat of paint.
Do people still care about Superman?
This same studio recently announced that Harry Potter would receive a reboot in the form of an HBO series.
How many Harry Potter fans are excited about this?
Amazon didn’t reboot Lord of the Rings, but they took the IP and put it on something they claim represents an interpretation of what Tolkien had in mind when he penned those tales.
No one asked for it, and no one watched it.
It all seems so soon to be rebooting these properties, but that’s only because they don’t own Lucasfilm. George Lucas is the creator of all this “IP” shit in Hollywood. It was Star Wars and then his (and Spielberg’s) Indiana Jones franchises that started what is so commonplace now: movie “universes”. Those two movie franchises used to standalone as the standards for big money-making movies. Since then, Spielberg has helped launch the Jurassic Park franchise, and we’ve seen Terminators and Predators and Aliens and horror franchises, and a franchise built around toys, and another built around an amusement park ride and more built around comic book heroes.
But all the fans are getting older, and, like Indy, we’re losing steam; we’re losing interest in watching tired ideas. In some ways, Indiana Jones looked tired of being Indiana Jones. A bit of the magic was gone. Give James Mangold and Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge and the rest of the cast and crew some credit because it looks like they tried hard to make some “whizz-bang” fun. You can’t manufacture it like that, though. You can capture it with a creation, and it can organically manifest itself in the audience, but you can’t keep showing us the stuff we used to remember as being fun and telling us that it still is.
The post-Disney era of Star Wars movies has failed for a lot of reasons, and I’m not sure if a lack of that magic is part of it or a result of it, but Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny suffered at the box office because the previous Indiana Jones movie sucked; it sucked the magic from the franchise. Indy 5 feels a bit warmed over. I think it would’ve been more successful if Crystal Skull didn’t exist. With these two major intellectual properties now proving that they aren’t nearly as bulletproof as they once were, their futures seem bleak. This should be a warning to movie studios that leaning so heavily on brand name can backfire. Spend less money and take chances on some original intellectual properties. Create new franchises and let the past die.
