Speaking with Empire at their VIP event for the release of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, James Mangold revealed that the fifth and final big screen adventure almost had a different name, one very much tied in to the era the film arrived in – yes, in another dimension it could have been called Indiana Jones and the Magical Mystery Tour.
“When I first pitched the movie to Kathy [Kennedy], Steven [Spielberg] and Harrison [Ford], what I was thinking, I was carrying this title in my head which was never going to work, because we’d have to clear that with The Beatles at an expense beyond all imagination. But it was Indiana Jones and the Magical Mystery Tour.
“When I came onto the movie I found the existing scripts were wanting to me. There were interesting adventures but they were adventures where the hero just happened to be old. His age and his place in the world seemed to have little consequence in the movie, which seemed to be to be a kind of invisible trait as you read the script.”
