Disney’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny director James Mangold blames fans for the movie’s massive failure.
The flick is reported to have lost Disney at least $143 million and made Hollywood’s annual “bombs” list in 2023.
What does James Mangold say about Indiana Jones?
Now a year-and-a-half after the film’s release, James Mangold offers it’s the fans who are to blame as Mangold feels no matter what they would have done, it wouldn’t have made the fans happy (via Deadline):
You have a wonderful, brilliant actor who’s in his eighties. So I’m making a movie about this guy in his eighties, but his audience on one other level doesn’t want to confront their hero at that age. And I am like, I’m good with it. We made the movie. But the question is, how would anything have made the audience happy with that, other than having to start over again with a new guy? And then here come lifelong heroes from my childhood into my life going, “We have something for you to work on.” It was a joyous experience, but it hurt in the sense that I really love Harrison and I wanted audiences to love him as he was and to accept that that’s part of what the movie has to say—that things come to an end, that’s part of life.
Why aren’t fans happy?
Regarding not making the fans happy, it’s probably not because Indiana Jones is old or that the fans are old. It probably has to do with the fact they were going to replace Indiana Jones with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character, Helena. However, Mangold confirmed he changed things.
It also probably didn’t help the film underwent massive reshoots and when Disney debuted Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at the Cannes Film Festival, the film was received with a lukewarm reception from critics and those in attendance.
Lucasfilm under Kathleen Kennedy already ruined Star Wars and Willow, now it was Kennedy’s turn to ruin Indiana Jones.
Reports offered a planned ending that took place in the 1930s featured a young Indiana Jones sacrificing himself to save Helena, causing the old Indy to fade away. Helena then picks up the whip, dons the fedora, and becomes the new Indiana Jones. The classic John Williams music score hits.
“When I came on the movie, they had been playing with a bunch of different things which were basically just reduxes of what had happened in the first movie. Just more apparitions and ghosts and I felt like I was just watching the first movie over again when I envisioned what was in the existing scripts,” Mangold told Gizmodo back in 2023. “And I felt like what Steven [Spielberg] and George [Lucas] and Larry Kasdan and David Koepp as well had done successfully in the other films, was to keep kind of pulling up a rock on a different aspect of history and metaphysics and not going back to the same thing. In a way I didn’t want to do the kind of ‘Is it a Death Star again?’”
Disney’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny brought in $383.9 million worldwide and starred Harrison Ford. The Rotten Tomatoes Score from critics is at 70% and from the fans is at 87%. The CinemaScore is a “B+.”
