It was a mistake to premiere James Mangold’s ‘Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny’ at Cannes, where it garnered decisively mixed reviews. The post-Cannes reviews were slightly more favorable — it’s currently at 70% on Rotten Tomatoes — but not enough to save it from becoming a box-office failure.
It’s possible that moviegoers were so turned off by 2008’s ‘Kingdom of Crystal Skull’ that they decided to tune out ‘Dial of Destiny’ by the time it rolled around in theaters. However, Mangold has a different theory as to why it failed. The filmmaker is telling Deadline that it might have had to do with audience reluctance to watch an 81-year-old Harrison Ford reprise the role:
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?
Mangold goes on to say that he was “hurt” by audience and critic reaction to the film, adding that he “really wanted audiences to love [Ford] 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.”
The price tag for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” was a ridiculous $329M. It ended up grossing a disappointing $384M worldwide, which amounted to $134M in losses for Disney (via Forbes). The prior ‘Indy,’ ‘Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,’ earned more than $790M globally. The franchise has officially hit a dead end.
It's not that ‘Dial of Destiny’ was a bad film. Its first half was decent, and that opening sequence on top of the train was memorably realized, but the second half was weak and the ending was baffling.
It’s no big surprise then that Ford confirmed that he’s officially retired the character. A rumored reboot with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character now seems very unlikely. There might not be much of a future for this storied franchise.
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