How director James Mangold feels about Indiana Jones and the Twists of Fate

James Mangold’s epic adventure “Indiana Jones and the Tablet of Destiny” It was a very expensive film. One report in Forbes He noted that the film’s price could reach $387 million, which, if accurate, would make it one of the 10 most expensive films of all time. It came at the end of an unfortunate trend in Hollywood – still in the midst of fading – of overspending on blockbuster films in the hopes of making billions in return. This model worked As for the very, very, very expensive movie “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” Which cost about $447 million to produce but earned more than $2 billion worldwide. However, in recent years, failures have become much more common than successful films, and expensive productions such as “The Marvels” or “The Flash” have ended up being failures.

“Dial of Destiny,” the fifth film in the successful “Indiana Jones” series, was intended to capture the same enthusiasm as “Star Wars,” but audiences were unimpressed with the film’s size, its uninteresting plot, and the fact that star Harrison Ford — who was… Once a capable action star who often punched bad guys, rode motorcycles, and made women sleep – he’s now 80 and less able to do those things. It was also the first film in the series not to be directed by Steven Spielberg, which likely alienated some of the more passionate fans. It also didn’t help that the reviews were just lukewarm; It has a modest approval rating of 70% on Rotten Tomatoes. “Dial of Destiny” grossed just $384 million worldwide. Using Hollywood accounting (which includes marketing), the film likely lost about $143 million overall.

Naturally, Mangold wasn’t happy about the film’s failure. The director of “Walk the Line,” “Logan” and “A Complete Unknown” put a lot of thought and energy into his “Indiana Jones” movie, spending millions to make it look as great as possible, and was thrilled to have gotten to continue the series he’d been passionate about since childhood. After all that hard work, most of the audience didn’t care much. Mangold spoke with Deadline Recently it was announced that he was injured.

Mangold admits he was at a dead end. Already tasked with producing a new Indiana Jones film, he could have either hired 80-year-old Harrison Ford or cast a new actor. Considering the options available, the first seemed largely preferable, but Mangold knew the audience would reject either one. He described his dilemma as follows:

“You have a wonderful, wonderful actor who’s in his 80s. (…) So I’m making a movie about this guy who’s in his 80s, but his audience on another level doesn’t want to face their hero at that age and I’m like, ‘I’m good at that.’ We made the movie but the question is, how was there anything that would make the audience happy about that, other than having to start over with a new guy?

But more than anything, Mangold realized that audiences rejected his film’s themes of mortality. He wanted to say: All heroes die. After all, action heroes live by the rules of violence, often punching and killing hundreds of “bad guys” in the name of truth. But all this killing must consume a person’s soul and does not necessarily guarantee a comfortable existence late in life. Audiences accepted those themes in Mangold’s “Logan” – About an old wolverine – But he turned it down with Indiana Jones. He said:

“Here are my childhood heroes (Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy) coming into my life and saying, ‘We have something you can work on.’ (It was) an exhilarating experience, but painful, in the sense that I really loved Harrison and I wanted the audience to love him for who he was, and for them to accept that That’s part of what the movie has to say, the end, and that’s part of life.”

The aging Indiana Jones wasn’t a good fit for the big studio or the big audience, unfortunately. Harrison Ford has retired from the role, and there are no plans currently in the works for any other Indiana Jones spinoffs. This is how the franchise ends. Not with a bang, but a dial.