One of the cinematic surprises of 2023 wasn’t how fantastic Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was, but how it failed to connect at the global box office. With the film now released on Disney Plus and home video, James Mangold sat down with io9 to discuss that disconnect and why he believes the fourth sequel missed out on the top 10 for the year when it’s predecessors were 1st in ’81 (Raiders), 2nd in ’84 (Temple of Doom) and ’89 (The Last Crusade) and 3rd in 2008 (Crystal Skull) at the North American box office.
“There’s nothing I can do about how much a movie is going to make worldwide in a window of four weeks… other than [interviews] like this … Our grosses were very much in keeping with other films of similar ilk this last summer and none of them featured a hero who was both Harrison’s age and also was a franchise that had been dormant for 20 years.”
“A lot of what expectations are based on is also what movies cost, and I think it’s not just true of our film, but others. We made these films during a time of covid. In the case of Indy, they had already been prepping a different movie and had spent a lot of money before we even started. And so it’s just hard to make large-scale movies when world travel was decreased and you could be shut down at any moment by one person in your crew testing positive. And I thought it was heroic of all the studios to keep pushing on and making these pictures despite that, even though they were all costing 20 or 30% more than they would have if they had been made at another time.”
