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Notes -
Again, it's all rumours, but this was apparently meant to be - at the start anyway - as a "handing over the baton" movie; Indy sits back in his rocking-chair and hands it all over to his goddaugher (the character played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and one of the original versions seems to really have dragged Indy's character down, even rumoured to have the time travel McGuffin used to go back in time and wipe him out of the timeline completely so the only Indy would be new girlboss Indy. As you can imagine, that went down swell at test screenings 🙄
The version at Cannes seems to have gone down like a lead balloon with the critics, even when Disney scrubbed a ton of the indignities heaped on Indy, and some critics were pretty savage about it.
Even on Rotten Tomatoes, where there are critics saying it's good, the score stands (so far) at 50%:
The good news is that it’s not as poor as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The bad news is that it’s not much better.
Mostly, it's to wrap up the series (presumably while Ford is still alive and can still act the part). There's sort of on-off talk about maybe doing a TV show, who knows, but that's down the line. Even in the movie, they seem to have used CGI to de-age Indy for the opening bits set in the past, so perhaps that's the future, if AI gets off the ground: Number XIX in the Indiana Jones franchise with all (or mostly) AI-generated actors! Even if your star has been dead for thirty years, we can make them look eternally 35 years old for a limitless number of features!
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