Five Indiana Jones reboots, pitched

It's a holiday here in the United States, namely our Independence Day, a day I'm having no sorts of feelings about this year, no ma'am. But in the name of getting time with my family, here's a quick little something to tide you over until next week! –Em

Earlier this week, The Disinsider caused a minor stir around the internet when it suggested that Lucasfilm might be looking to do a full reboot of Indiana Jones in a couple of years, evidently attempting to find someone to fill Harrison Ford's enormous fedora.

A major caveat applies: Though Disinsider is a solid Disney gossip site, tossing something vague like this at the end of a mailbag column is a good way to get people talking without really having to source anything. Gossip sites work in this fashion, tossing out reasonably credible bits of information, then surrounding them with lots of half-formed but tantalizing nuggets, designed to get you salivating with great interest at something that might happen. If Indy is never rebooted, will anybody look back on this mailbag post and wonder how Disinsider could have gotten it so wrong? Of course not, and that's how you know you're running a good gossip blog.

Anyway, let's take the report at face value. The first thing we can probably agree on is that this is a terrible idea for multiple reasons. Why must every piece of intellectual property be rebooted endlessly, ad infinitum? Who could possibly possess the same charisma as Harrison Ford? How are we going to get around the less savory aspects of Indiana's job in an era that is still more woke than 1981, despite all our current president's attempts to the contrary? It's not as though 2023's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny made it seem as though there's a massive, rabid fanbase for this franchise that isn't being served. For the most part, the movie (which disappointed at the box office) was greeted with a shrug. Why does Disney assume a reboot will somehow not suffer the same fate?

Well, because our entertainment industry gods are hungry, and they must be fed reheated intellectual property. Since that is indisputably true, I thought I would pitch five separate takes on Indiana Jones that might actually make me want to go to a theater, along with stars and directors to make them. And to make things harder for myself, I didn't just go with the easiest pulls out there. Sure, we all know Hollywood is going to shoehorn Glen Powell into this thing, but what if they didn't?? Now, imagine a little dotted line showing me traveling from this paragraph to the next subhead.

The safe approach

So, we all know that Disney is probably just going to do a movie that serves as a soft remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Probably Indy won't go after the Ark of the Covenant yet again, but you bet your ass it'll be set in the 1930s and involve him fighting Nazis in the Middle East for one reason or another. He'll be a white guy, paired with a fast-talking, smart-aleck white lady, and the director will be someone who's had a solid level of experience with popcorn filmmaking.

If all of the above is true, then I want Ebon Moss-Bachrach playing Indiana Jones, with Anne Hathaway as Rarion Mavenwood. Then I'm asking Gina Prince-Bythewood to plop in the director's chair. Maybe we'll convince Disney to let us set it in the American Southwest and involve the search for the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine or something. I don't know.

Now, Moss-Bachrach is 48, which maybe seems old to play Indy, but what I was surprised to find was that Harrison Ford was 38 when he shot Raiders and solidly in his 40s for both of the first two sequels. Moss-Bachrach is older than that, but Indy is a character where you want to see a little mileage on those tires, so to speak. Plus, he's got that roguish thing going for him, the thing where you're pretty sure he's stolen several priceless antiquities and got away with it because he looked handsome doing so. Casting Hathaway – who knows how to do charming and funny – gives you someone who can call him on his shit, which I think you're going to need. And while not everybody loved Prince-Bythewood's The Old Guard, I did, and I think it showed that she's got the chops to do something filled with feats of derring-do. (Did you know "derring-do" is hyphenated? I sure didn't.)

The time-shifted approach

The original Indiana Jones trilogy came out in the 1980s and depicted events in the 1930s. If we were going to keep this half-century ago approach, then we should obviously be setting a 2020s Indiana Jones movie in the 1970s. Probably, you would end up with something slightly more James Bond-y than the originals, what with the Cold War intrigue, but it's not like you couldn't do a story about trying to find the Spear of Destiny before a bunch of hardliners who want to start a nuclear war do. The stakes just shift slightly.

There are a bunch of different film movements of the 1970s that could lend themselves well to an Indiana Jones film. The obvious answer is to create an homage to blockbuster cinema, but let's not have this snake eat its own tail, okay? I am going to pitch this as a very, very, very mild homage to blaxploitation and cast Donald Glover as Indy and Teyana Taylor as his love interest, then ask A.V. Rockwell to direct.

Glover playing a charming rapscallion goes almost without saying. The man has seemed a bit bored with being famous lately, which, perversely, makes him a surprisingly good analogue for the real Harrison Ford, who eventually just stopped caring about stardom at all. Then I wanted to find a director who could really lean into the period element, and I remembered how great Rockwell's A Thousand and One was at capturing New York City across a large swath of history on a budget. I hate the thing where a promising indie director is tossed into a big franchise picture without getting to take a few intermediate steps, but I do think Rockwell's skill with depicting the past would give her a boost. Finally, I just wanted her to work with Taylor again. If you've seen Thousand and One, you'll get it.

The anti-colonialist approach

The obvious problem with Indiana Jones as a hero is that his whole thing has become outdated. "It belongs in a museum" as a rallying cry makes sense as a way to differentiate the guy from greedy jerks who just want to make a quick buck, but if you are aware of how many museums' collections were meant to display the riches of empire and show off the wealth of countries that were oppressing people all over the world, it gets a little harder to get on board with the guy. Not impossible! But harder!

Yet what if you really leaned into this aspect of the story? What if you created an Indiana Jones who was meant to explicitly be doing anti-colonialist stuff, taking artifacts from museums and giving them back to less wealthy populations? Could you cross Indiana Jones with Robin Hood? You possibly could if you cast Dev Patel as Indy, then had Zahn McClarnon play a Marcus Brody-ish figure. Is Sterlin Harjo going to direct? You know it!

Patel is the youngest of the prospective Indianas on my list, but I think this approach probably excels if you've got an actor who seems less seasoned. I might have him keep his British accent, just to underline the film's themes without shining too bright a light on them. And, I mean, the guy's charming and suave and handsome, which are all important traits. I've always really liked the character of Marcus in the Jones films, and it felt like this approach could use a mentor-ish figure to underline that the idea of artifacts not necessarily belonging to a pillaging outsider culture isn't a new one. Plus, McClarnon understands how to play a punchline, which will be very helpful because our director is Harjo. He's another guy who doesn't have the requisite "making a blockbuster" experience, which might make me wary, but if we're going full anti-colonialist, then we want someone who can talk about important topics while keeping things funny, which is kind of his whole deal. I can't wait for all the Fox News headlines about Indiana Jones and the Crippling Greed of Empire!

The ultra-colonialist, satirical approach

Okay, but what if you decided to really lean into the worst aspects of Indy as a character and his profession as depicted in the films? What if you made a movie about how great it is that our hero is swooping into burial grounds and tombs to make off with artifacts that are then sent to museums thousands of miles away? What if you created a movie that underscored how fucked all of this is by seeming like you were celebrating it? Would anybody understand your satire? Probably not, but let's pretend the modern filmgoing public is super smart and capable!

Are we doing lady Indy? We're doing lady Indy and casting Rosamund Pike, and we're telling her to go full British because as horrible as every other colonizing power was, the Brits really got being awful down to a science. Then we're going to lean into the slightly icky undertones of the original Indy/Marion relationship by casting the much younger Paul Mescal as her hunky love interest. And while this pains me to type, as someone who is not a huge fan of his work, I kinda think Edgar Wright is the best choice to direct. But since I'm not a huge fan, I'm going to put Paul King's name in bold and pretend that makes more sense.

Anyway, this is a bad idea. Don't do this. Audiences have always completely missed the point of even the most obvious of satires, and I 100 percent do not trust the moviegoing public to walk away from this with a take more nuanced than "Seems cool that they were oppressing all those cultures!" But it does live in my head and heart as something just a little bit awful and dark, an acidic storybook twist on a Paul Verhoeven film.

The let's not and say we did approach

No, really, why are we doing another Indiana Jones? You want to make an adventure film? Find whoever you think the Spielberg of right now is – I mean, let's be honest, it's Ryan Coogler – and ask them to make you an adventure movie. Don't tell them anything other than, "I think it should have lots of narrow escapes from danger" and see what happens. Raiders of the Lost Ark was a minor risk when it was made, despite featuring some big names attached. Harrison Ford was not yet Harrison Ford. Spielberg was still becoming Spielberg. Karen Allen? Denholm Elliott? John Rhys-Davies? Not exactly household names then or now.

Hollywood, unfortunately, has forgotten that it used to be pretty good at doing exactly this, at identifying up-and-coming talent and wedding them to a project that would make everything about them pop. Stop trying to mine the past and make something that feels like the present, even when it's set in the past. Let the old stories die; tell some new ones.

(But seriously, Ryan Coogler would absolutely demolish a Romancing the Stone reboot, right?)

A Good Song

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