The fifth an final installment of the Indiana Jones franchise released this past summer to a rather underwhelming box office and a mixed reaction from longtime fans. The film was the first to not be directed by the legendary Stephen Spielberg and instead by Logan director James Mangold.
The film had a rough production with working around the COVID-19 Pandemic and the number of significant delays and rumored reshoots. While there had been a number of reports suggesting massive reworks of the film behind the scenes to scrambling to reshoot the ending months before release Mangold has denied almost every one.
However, in a recent interview with io9, the director revealed that the ending that we got in the finished film wasn’t the one they had originally planned.
“When I came on the movie, they had been playing with a bunch of different things which were basically just reduxes of what had happened in the first movie. Just more apparitions and ghosts, and I felt like I was just watching the first movie over again when I envisioned what was in the existing scripts.”
“And I felt like what Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and Larry Kasdan and David Koepp as well had done successfully in the other films, was to keep kind of pulling up a rock on a different aspect of history and metaphysics and not going back to the same thing. In a way I didn’t want to do the kind of ‘Is it a Death Star again?’“
He would go on to explain that after going back to the drawing board, he thought of an older hero who was out of his element. They then came to the decision that time, and the life of the hero, be the key elements that bring the story together.
“The movie is exploring the themes of time, past and present. That became my central idea. When we did start writing, it was my theory that at first that we would end up back in Nazi Germany in 1938.“
“As we got there, it started occurring to me that a) that’s what the audience is going to be anticipating, and therefore not very surprising to them, and b) we’d be plunged just back into the opening of the film only with a 79-year-old Indy running around.“
He would then reveal that after some thinking the idea needed to be ‘bigger’ and more than just a time loop, leading to the ending that we got.
“I felt we needed something more shocking, something bolder, and something that also affected Indy. If he had gone back to Nazi Germany, he would simply be a hero trying to stop Voller from doing his plan. If he ended up where he does end up in the film, he was going to be facing bigger questions about his own life and what he studied all his life. And I thought that was going to be more interesting. And also, usually bolder is better if you can do it.“
However, some notice that the original plan revolving around Indiana Jones traveling back to 1938 matches up with earlier rumors before the massive delays of an older Indiana meeting a younger version of himself. If this is at all true, then are the rumors of Pheobe Waller-Bridge’s character replacing Indy also true? We may never know for sure.
Whatever the case, this shows that the film was indeed going through changes after it was greenlit. How far along do those changes go? We aren’t sure. What’s sure is that fans of the franchise didn’t show up to support it at the theater.
What do you think? Was Mangold right to change the ending? Or should we have seen Indy time travel to 1938?
Source: Gizmodo
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