Indy 5 Future of Indiana Jones franchise post-Harrison Ford

Girls With Sabers (Reylo-centric YouTube livestream) recently mentioned roles they'd like to see Adam Driver tackle. Most of these choices are often classic literature period pieces with many of the usual Byronic suspects. But then they mentioned Indiana Jones (which has been brought up before).

If you had asked me about Indiana Jones pre-KotCS replacing Harrison Ford, I'd have shouted it down as much as anyone. I'm a huge Harrison fangirl from way back. But... Yes, I do want the series to actually continue after Harrison.

Here's a not-so-little writeup I did on the idea:

Adam really is one of the better ideas so the series can be resurrected seriously and dramatically, rather than as a sanitized, comical CGI spectacle afraid of depicting history/cultures in a pulpy way and all of Indy's edgier imperfections (messy, serial romantic entanglements à la James Bond that would be #metoo'd now, grave robbing, deadly weapon use, etc...) being airbrushed out. Indy really needs to be sent permanently back to the '10s-'40s.

Sadly, I don't trust Spielberg and Lucas these days to not gut it (Raiders and Temple were at risk of being R-rated and the latter helped create PG-13) and take shortcuts like not filming internationally (hopefully, without the dysentery and elephants eating dresses!). They were very different filmmakers in the '80s. Get new, serious-minded creative talent who is willing to take it back tonally to its roots.

It's a franchise that desperately needs to go back to being a stronger PG-13 and be willing to keep Indy's less pristine, not-so-heroic qualities in regards to relationships, violence and unethical archaeology. It was obvious that Spielberg wouldn't make an Indy film like that again (also less willing to use such pulpy villain portrayals). It also needs exotic locations (no all-U.S. shoot) and to not let current cultural sensitivities intrude jarringly in a way that doesn't feel authentic to the genre or period.

And it's not just because Adam vaguely looks like Harrison, but he also has the needed combination of masculinity, vulnerability, dry/acerbic/sarcastic humor (Harrison and Adam are both serious, socially-awkward, not-overly-cuddly introverts--goofball humor should never be Indy) and a serious, dramatic edge. Harrison is famous for his slow-mo dramatic head turns and speaking at a slower pace than current action stars. The original trilogy feels paced like period piece dramas full of talky scenes, exposition, lingering travelogue scenery and relationship dramas compared to tent pole summer blockbusters of today which never seem to have time for that between action set pieces.

You need a serious, dramatic actor in the role who can do badass, tough-to-the-point-of-ruthlessly-deadly (think Cairo swordsman and flaming poultry), undeniably masculine action hero, yet fights in a scrappy, messy way where he's in over his head and gets visibly tired and injured, as well as a charming, sexy, romantic leading man.

That vulnerable action hero quality is exactly how Adam chose to portray Ben's fighting style in order to evoke Han. Harrison was *never* a Rambo or Terminator in an era filled with action heroes of that type. He played vulnerable action heroes who showed when they were beaten down and visibly sick with dysentery (he looks utterly wrecked and sweat-soaked in those shots).

I think the role really would fit a lot of things Adam could do very well. He's also the right age for Indy's heyday where the character really needs to be.

Looks like Spielberg is definitely not directing (I 100% expected that). I think at this point it would be better to have Harrison do bookends (...set in the '70s) with the main adventure sent back to the '30s. The other route is total reboot and go full James Bond with the role. Fountain of Youth (or time-travel to fix the era problem) would maybe work thematically, but Indy in a time period where Star Wars is in theaters is yikes! Someone here made a good point about making the action more like The Fugitive, which would work better with Harrison's age.

Either way, I legitimately consider Adam an ideal person to take over the role (even if he didn't look believably like a son of a Harrison character, I'd actually prefer going with an actor with the qualities we already know he has in common with Harrison as part of his natural personality and the strong acting chops over, say, exact hair coloring--Adam might have to tweak the haircut), along with a director with a serious, dramatic vision who can take it back to that old-fashioned period film tone and resurrect the series into something that can keep going.

Another thing that could be perhaps worked more into the character if Adam were put in the role is some of the Young Indy backstory, which besides the childhood of being tutored by his father, globetrotting and meeting the who's who of the famous and infamous, was a character who was portrayed as having been in WWI as a teenager.

Young Indy had an audience problem because it was a bit too close to the educational part of edutainment instead of pure action-adventure, though it did have episodes that tried to rectify that like Treasure of the Peacock's Eye and Masks of Evil.

Masks of Evil is the episode that skirts close to contradicting how much of a non-believer Indy could possibly be in Raiders by having him meet a rat-fanged, vampiric Dracula who has been undead since the 15th century--the Crusader knight wasn't even his first immortal. In a reboot, the idea of Indy as a skeptic would probably have to go, given his new set of adventures are likely to be more mystical than historical. Temple also contradicted Raiders with that, given they had Indy go into a full-blown mystical trance under the Black Sleep of Kali (one of the more unique performances of Harrison's career, even with all the sci-fi/fantasy roles he ended up in!).

Harrison's nature man and D.I.Y. carpenter pilot persona always fit really well into both Han and Indy. There was a lot of him in those roles. He's a guy who you could really imagine going from motorcycle to plane to horse to tank in one movie.

Indy also has to be cast with an actor who can legitimately learn how to use a bullwhip (yes, it's dangerous) on top of horse riding and various other weapons (swords, guns, etc...). Indy really had the best of the best with stuntmen, but you know when it's really Harrison getting dragged behind the truck, for example. Harrison also had the bonus of not being afraid of heights (real rope bridge), snakes or any creepy crawlies. Spielberg actually was afraid of heights when it came to the bridge, whereas Harrison was just running across it.

If Adam was brought into the role, Indy's WWI military backstory might be used more prominently. Another aspect of the character (and another thing that I think fits Adam very well), and the thing that separates Indy most from Han, is that Indy also has a nerdier side to him. He's a tweed-clad professor who wears glasses when he's presenting himself in a more professional way (not only while being a very poor teacher with a class full of moony schoolgirls and late to grade all their papers, but when he's attending fancy dinners). It's also a part of his persona that came from who his father was and how he grew up. That early maturity aspect and ability to switch from nerdy archaeologist to self-reliant action man is something also very present in Young Indy.

It's kind of like how every James Bond is a bit different with aspects tailored to each actor, yet key traits remaining more consistent. Han and Indy were built with pieces of Harrison in the mix; some just naturally brought out in the performance and others written in. Spielberg's love for father/son stories across many of his earlier films is quite present in The Last Crusade, so that was a bit of himself put into that film. The ex-military aspect is a little piece of already-present canon that could be used with Adam.

Thoughts? Who else do you think could wear the fedora? Would you rather see Harrison in a bookend adventure or a clean reboot?

Chris Pratt and his ilk often get mentioned for this sort of thing and are perhaps more obvious fits for the kind of goofier humor we see in CGI-fest blockbusters today (what I don't want for Indy), but I think I'd rather see an actor who already has these similarities with Harrison and the acting chops to bring the franchise back to its tonal roots.

This might be too many big blockbusters for Adam (would he be willing?) after SW and perhaps too obviously connected... And yet, River Phoenix played Harrison's character's son in Mosquito Coast and was cast as the first of the young Indys based on it. Harrison recommended River. George Lucas used to say the same thing about casting Harrison too many times (couldn't audition for SW because of American Graffiti and wasn't considered for Indy, despite being Spielberg's first choice because of ESB, until Tom Selleck's contractual obligation for Magnum P.I. got in the way) and look how that kept turning out.

We also know that Harrison is full of praise for Adam. The appeal of the father/son story and respect for Adam as an actor were a big part of why he came back for TRoS. I think it'd be a choice he'd approve of if he were willing to give the role up and allow the franchise to continue. I know he's highly protective over the role and has expressed not wanting it to go the James Bond route, but it might work with the right talent.

 

Those are some great ideas! I'd also like to see a revival &recast of Young Indy, with a little more action than before. There are quite a few unused scripts that Lucas and co. were working on, such as one where Indy goes on a dig with Abner Ravenwood in Jerusalem. There are also more historical figures he could encounter, like JRR Tolkien, who was a soldier in WWI.

 

I'd love to see a Clone Wars style animated TV show about what Indy was up to during World War Two.

Admittedly this doesn't necessarily fit the "post Harrison Ford" thing, since one of the advantages of such a show would be that you could still use his voice without having to care that the actor's now as old as he is.

 

Harrison is definitely out of the price range for an animated cartoon, I'm afraid. I think movies or a television show would do the character, even if it has to be without Harrison, far more justice.

I don't want to see the character watered down, the dangerous or scary situations lessened and the history sanitized to that extent, even if it still exists to capture the minds of every age.

I think the bookend adventure is the way to hand off the role, while still allowing him to be part of it.

Unfortunately, I actually believe the era issue to be a bigger problem than Harrison's own physicality due to age. The character was born in 1899, which means the timeline has to move up accordingly. At a certain point, the world changed so much (and got so much smaller) that Indy's entire persona becomes a man out of time. While there are parts of the world that still manage to be untouched by time, they're getting far fewer. Cultural attitudes to archaeology itself start making Indy's way of doing things even murkier.

Historically speaking, a lot of the early adventurers and travelers were really like Indiana Jones (think of the likes of circus-strongman-turned-adventurer Giovanni Belzoni being chased through Karnak by Napoléon's troops and grabbing a gun being fired out of their hands with a statue still bearing marks from that altercation!) and some of them really died during their adventures to dangerous, far-off lands (if not murdered or caught in dicey political situations, it was causes like dysentery, the plague--such as in the case of half of Napoléon's troops at Jaffa and Lord Carnarvon's mosquito bite). And as we know from the filming of Raiders, those risks (dysentery) were far from over in some of these countries as late as 1980.

Between WWI and WWII was really the final heyday of this era. The end of colonialism also occurred at this time. Colonialism was when a lot of Western foreigners began being able to semi-safely travel to these places (outside of a military context) and were doing so in significant numbers. This coincided with a lot of scientists and historians going over in addition to tourists, soldiers, diplomats and bureaucrats. Everyone was looking to make the next big discovery, no matter what their background was. Subsequently, there were a lot of these really colorful characters. After that, the era of Lawrence of Arabia was over.

WWII's big tie-in to this crazy treasure-seeking and grave-robbing archaeology that captured the world's imagination at the time was how Hitler really was sending archaeologists to go looking for 'magical' relics like the Spear of Destiny.

WWI, in particular, was a really bizarre war in that it was the end of many ancient royal families and warfare that included fighting on horseback, horse-drawn carts, bayonets, kilted regiments, etc..., then suddenly facing planes, tanks, submarines, poisonous gases and trenches. Indy's timeline bridges two worlds that are crashing together--ancient and modern.

After a certain point, Indy is more likely to just start getting arrested for doing what he used to do. Thus, the part of a teacher and a teller of stories from a different era is all that he'd be left with unless he went legit. As far as going more modern, well, do we really want to watch Indy carefully brushing away dirt or crashing through things? That's not to say that the world stopped being dangerous for well-meaning historians caught in the middle of political situations. Just look at what happened at Palmyra or even the ransacking and looting of the Egyptian Museum.

Indy's birth year is really why the franchise needs to return to its home era when it's revitalized into something that can continue into the far future.

 

This is actually why, before KOTCS, I was always kind of opposed to Soviet villains for the Indy movies. The reason the World War Two setting works so well is that, as you say, the fascists really were obsessed with that kind of thing. Not just obtaining artifacts, but just more generally appropriating the mythology of the past and recreating it in the present (with a Roman Empire theme for the Italians, and a Teutonic one for the Germans) for their own purposes. As enemies for someone like Indy, they're basically perfect.

The communists are... incredibly not. For them, all the shining utopias are in the future, not the past. Which actually makes them kind of perfect as a certain kind of villain, embodying the arrival of that age you're talking about when men like Indy are increasingly relics themselves. They're just not the kind of villains you could see racing Indy to the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant.

(KOTCS gets around this by shifting the artifact-race from the "ancient mythology and religion" category to the "ancient aliens and weird science" category. Which does also work, but I understand turned off a lot of people).

 

You could totally make modern action-adventure movies around archaeology and keep them much more exciting than "carefully brushing away dirt," it's just that, as you say, it'd be a very different kind of movie, less "colonial era adventure" and more "crime/caper." Less following maps to buried treasure and finding your way through booby-trapped temples, more navigating through the world of smugglers, fences, underground auctions, and that entire black market underworld that moves ancient artifacts from conflict zones to private collectors. (Daesh's trafficking in artifacts is just screaming for a Lara Croft/Nathan Drake type movie based around it).

That world is probably so different from Indy's as to be unrecognizable, but it'd be a decent place to dump his successor into. Pity the only person in that role so far is Shia LaBoeuf, who just... no.

 

Bit of a shameless bump, but I thought I'd share my Indy tribute.



I'd also like to hear thoughts about not letting Indy 5 be the last of the franchise. I still think it's a mistake.

Perhaps a proper, modern television show would be a good way to bring back a younger, but adult Indy (with perhaps flashbacks littered throughout).

You can also get away with a lot more content (definitely aim for TV-14) and characters who are allowed to be flawed. Relationship dramas are serialized storytelling's forte in a way that is disappearing more and more from blockbuster films. Complicated characters are better left to television, as the audience expects and allows for it because of the nuance and depth the serialization affords. The complicated, messy story of Abner and Marion is a story best left to being explored only after the characters have some real complexity and development. It also wouldn't be forced to play to the mass audience of under-13s that makes modern PG-13 often meaningless. In comparison, TV-14 actually pushes up harder against its limits regularly--not just violence, but also with innuendo and sexuality minus nudity. The amount of historical-style, pulpy violence, not to mention potentially comically gruesome deaths, in Indy would also necessitate the rating.

Indiana Jones might be niche enough at this point with an audience veering towards adults who grew up with it (Gen-X and the older end of Gen-Y), while Gen-Z has little awareness of it, that Disney wouldn't be forced to make it a total kiddie property. It's not the same situation as back in the early '90s with Young Indy being aimed at older kids who had recently seen Last Crusade in the theater. They could reboot it for television with a young adult Indy who potentially could grow into a fully adult version. And I wouldn't try too hard to not step on the trilogy's toes with the timeline. Just let it live in its own developing continuity.

 

(Cont.)

Use of long-running supporting cast (parents, Remy and returning guest stars aside) would also be a big difference from Young Indy. Characters like Belloq (could potentially go from friend to antagonist, akin to how Smallville handled Lex), Sallah, Henry, Brody, Abner, Marion, etc... could actually be around a lot more than just for an adventure here or there. These are all characters Indy had clearly known for years. Actually put the show into a seasonal, serialized format that isn't a new cast every episode. You could also stick around in locations a lot longer this way, which would help with budget.

 

Another thought I've had since watching an absolute ton of fantasy/sci-fi dramas in the last few years is that the influence of Indiana Jones is actually pretty apparent in a number of pretty famous characters, sometimes overtly and sometimes a bit more subtly.

Harrison, Indy or Raiders in general are outright name-checked in quite a few places, often by scrappy action hero types who tend to take hard beatings (the kinds of characters who should've died a hundred times over) while in situations they're way over their heads in or literally impossible odds they can't win. Like Indy, the intended prize isn't won at the end and, outside of a few gruesome baddie deaths, the shady, corrupt or evil barely get a dent.

Fox Mulder and Dean Winchester are two characters who name-check the comparison overtly and you can see the writers and actors both having the influence in mind. It's obviously a male fantasy, too. The influence on The X-Files and Supernatural is definitely there. Supernatural is chock full of biblical MacGuffins (not to mention having angels and demons as most of its recurring supporting cast), so it would be a hard comparison to avoid. Raiders came up in the WWII Nazi submarine episode with a piece of the Ark onboard (it's subsequently a show to raid for Indy ideas, because they pretty much mined everything biblical), for example. The X-Files likewise was dealing with shady government officials and pretty blatantly copied the huge warehouse of government secrets loaded with alien relics (and then repeated the Cigarette Smoking Man's warehouse reveal with the tunnel of filing cabinets stretching on forever). Mulder was also very much a one-man army a lot of the time when it came to the alien conspiracy (no offense to Scully). Moments like him climbing/riding the tops of sky rides, trains and escaping the spaceship were total Indy-esque moments. Dean and Sam had literal God-tier levels of plot armor keeping them alive (repeated resurrections included).

Angel is another one that, unlike Mulder and the Winchesters being very human, is a supernatural character (subsequently his level of pain tolerance and durability is at the level of regular impalement, defenestration out of skyscrapers and being set on fire), but the comparison still holds because of how often he's getting decimated and fighting forces way beyond his pay grade. Wolfram & Hart, the Shanshu and seeking redemption with the Powers that Be, like the mytharc conspiracy/alien takeover and literal God a.k.a. Chuck, is another endless, unwinnable fight that is so far beyond all the protagonists that there's no win/happily ever after and they'd be lucky just walking away from it with nothing. Angel also name-checks Indy with a blatantly Indy-inspired fantasy dream episode (Awakening in season 4) with Angelus making a crack about the Raiders fantasy. George Lucas actually visited the Angel set back in 2000 and was interested in how they were making mini movies every week and doing some pretty huge stunts on television. David Boreanaz had lunch with Lucas and has talked about it a few times over the many years.

I mean, these are all shows starring action-oriented leading men and writing staffs of relatively similar age. Mostly Gen-X males with a few Baby Boomers (more so on the writing staff) with an audience that's primarily Gen-Y but appealing to a pretty broad age range (and probably a lot more female than originally intended!). Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Harrison Ford films in general were very formative to that generation. Harrison Ford is the ultimate leading man action star to a certain generation. Gen-Y got their familiarity with all of that by being the original home video/VHS generation and subsequently a lot more familiar with retro media (including things that were made before they were born or around that time) than Gen-Z. '80s movies have a lot of currency and familiarity still with Gen-Y, even if Baby Boomers were the stars of them and Gen-X were the ones who saw them in theaters. Gen-Y fangirls absolutely dominate the fandoms of many iconic television supernatural/sci-fi franchises (many are admittedly aging franchises). The WB/CW have catered to this group of fans for the last two and a half decades.

If you're going to be reviving the character as a mid-20s-to-30s version (if the show lasts long enough, it probably will be stepping on the trilogy's toes timeline-wise by the end), I'd absolutely be aiming for this same audience and their tastes. They're also the audience who would be most receptive to and familiar with the character, IMO.

If I were going to reinvent Indiana Jones for the television landscape, I would definitely be looking at those sorts of shows that have influence from the character already in their DNA. I think for the target audience, they'd definitely need to be aiming it at the same fanbases. Young Indy mostly tried to avoid stepping on Raiders' toes (despite Temple of Doom and Mask of Evil already making it ludicrous) by limiting the amount of supernatural elements, but I think a show would have to go all in on it. Indy would have to be transformed a bit in regards to trying to line him up with a character who would still be skeptical after all he's seen. Young Indy ended up forced into being a straight period drama with educational elements, which is very counter to what the audience wanted. There are things to keep from that approach (meeting historical persons, being a WWI veteran and witnessing history could absolutely be mined as backdrops to the stories), but the supernatural elements would have to exist in a revival now to get the audience who I think would be most receptive to it.

While I would aim for a serialized drama format that would mean the globetrotting wouldn't have to completely change locations every episode (have it instead in arcs with some bigger MacGuffins and baddies perhaps crossing entire seasons), it's true that there would probably have to be more location filming than good, ol' Vancouver, but Disney is one of the few who could afford it (though Covid certainly would throw a wrench in it and political situations could potentially kill off certain locations). There's only so much green screen that Indy could get away with, though I imagine that a fair amount of it would have to be used for period piece reasons alone. There are a lot of modern intrusions even in historically-intact cities (Eastern Europe comes to mind as having a lot of its architecture intact and is affordable to film in) and around iconic landscapes to paint out.

But at its core, it probably would need to bulk up its focus on the relationship dramas. Indy tends to have a girl at every port and to a degree you would introduce some of these love interests, but there's still a lot of relationships of every kind that could be developed and serialized. Certainly throw in a few femme fatales and tragic losses, given the Smallville-esque situation of there being an inevitable Indy/Marion endgame that should be kept--it thus becomes about the journey when it's a set conclusion. Absolutely have a strong recurring cast of Henry and friends new and old. The films actually have a lot of characters that Indy didn't just meet yesterday and could be developed to a huge extent. For a show to work now, there'd have to be a lot more connectivity to how often the recurring cast appear. Young Indy had a lot more of an anthology format with little chance of us getting attached to most of the revolving cast outside of a very tiny few. That's the biggest thing I'd change. You need characters to become regulars beyond just Indy if it were revived for modern cinematic television (the true successor to the film serials of the '30s!) in a way that isn't necessary for film installments.

 

I would hope this installment serves as a sort of finale really. IMO the last one did as well, but here we are.

 

Yeah, at some point everything needs to be given a rest and while I'll give Indy 5 a look just for curiosity's sake, I'm ambivalent about stretching things beyond that. Some graphic novels? Sure. Maybe an animated spinoff? Okay. But between Young Indy and the next film, you've kind of got the room for stories tapped out, and the original films will always remain on a higher pedestal.

 

Kind of the point. It's a complete and utter dead end for the franchise. It doesn't have to be. And I repeat that I'm a fan of Harrison Ford.

I'd completely ignore the whole "room for stories" with the James Bond model, even though I actually would go for the missing period that begins where Young Indy stopped (there were a lot of major story beats that never got filmed) and before Temple/Raiders began (when he was already putting on mileage). That's most of the '20s and half of the '30s.

Harrison Ford will always be the iconic legend in the way Sean Connery was, but it doesn't have to be the end of the concept and character getting expanded on and not necessarily in the same continuity. As stated, the skepticism in Raiders is already on dodgy ground just between Temple of Doom and Masks of Evil alone--then the character is still skeptical in Last Crusade, which is just pushing him into blind-as-a-bat Scully territory. It would retain heavy nods to the original continuity, though taking it in a more supernatural direction would probably necessitate some deviation that would turn it into its entirely own separate thing.

One thing that sort of failed with Indy in regards to the James Bond model is the idea of the cast changing every episode. It failed on both accounts. The girls never measured up to Marion, so she became the one, and Sallah and Marcus returned to bring back Raiders for Last Crusade. Completely changing cast for every adventure didn't even stick in the original trilogy. And unlike Bond, there kind of has become a set endgame love interest now. That's prime material for a reboot to acknowledge.

Interestingly, there are actually a number of very flawed leading man heroes (every one I actually used in my comparisons) who had so much baggage that the girls basically would have to be just as crazy to end up with them (or in some cases, routinely ended up dead first). It's actually a legitimate issue in regards to their relationships. It often comes down to there really just being nobody else who'll have them or they're part of the same life in cases where the person actually ends up with anyone instead of the endless drought depictions because the characters are too busy being consumed by their missions with dangerous lives. There's a way to handle Indy that doesn't just make him an unwantable cad, while actually depicting his younger years where he was going through a lot of failed romances. Television would allow for a lot more of that than what gets in non-stop action tent pole blockbusters these days.

 

Being right in the middle of Gen Y, I just want to support all of this. It describes me to a tee. When Stranger Things came out, I remember thinking that I and probably many many others were perfectly positioned for that sort of eighties nostalgia trip despite our age. We're too young to actually remember the eighties, much less actually be the age of the kids on the show, but their pop culture defined our childhoods too all the same.

Still not convinced they really need to keep Indy going, but if they do, that would definitely be the generation to aim for.

 

I’m towards the ass end of the Millennial/Gen Y cohort, and I agree with that. Despite being born in the early/mid-90s, my two favorite movie series as a kid (which remain so as an adult) were Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and I wore out the video tapes for both trilogies before 2000 rolled around. Most friends in my age group have the same level of affection for both series, and take the quality of sequels, prequels, spin-offs and reboots very seriously (somewhat personally), even if they’re more casual fans.

 

My 3 favorite movies to this day are ESB, Star Wars(ANH), and Raiders. Jaws and Aliens are close.

 

Same here, actually, probably ranked as ANH, RotLA, TESB. I highly doubt any future Indiana Jones or Star Wars movies will ever live up to those three for me, but it’s almost not the point. I’ll still be there opening night for each one.

 

It also doesn't hurt that so much of the actual pop culture of our generation was a direct follow-up of so many trends that started in the eighties. Think of the absolute explosion of space opera TV shows from the late eighties to the late 2000s.

Come to think of it, it's a lot like being a teenager today. You don't actually remember the superhero explosion of the 2000s, you certainly wouldn't have seen X-Men or Spider-Man or The Dark Knight in theaters, but the pop culture you <em>do</em> consume, and will remember as "your childhood," is 100% shaped by the success of those movies.

 

Yeah, I'd agree with that. I was at the perfect age for the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies; was in grades 1, 3, and 6 when they were released, and yet it (anecdotal) seems that kids who are slightly younger than me are a bit more nostalgic for them than I or my friends are, and we all adored them when they were released. The media I have more affection for spans from the 80s-90s, because although it mostly wasn't being released while I was growing up, it was the media that continued to define the pop culture environment I came of age in.

So, taking this back to the topic of Indiana Jones post-Harrison Ford, I kind of think Gen Y and the very young Generation Alpha are the sweet spot demographic for an inevitable reboot, the former for nostalgia and the latter to build a new audience; they've probably missed the boat a bit with the Zoomers, who I honestly think would struggle to accept or reconcile the cultural environment of the character with a social media-influenced worldview.

 

THIS is what I want.



Make it happen Disney+

 

Indy would absolutely work in animation - I love the style of that short. I'd rather see something like that than an Indy continuation without Ford.

 

That was pretty cool.

 

I definitely see Indiana Jones show animated or otherwise happening eventually

 

A full reboot in 10 to 15 years time.

 

That animation above is really very impressive. It is highly stylised, but still Indiana Jones resembles Harrison Ford, which is quite nice xx