Top 5 Things I’d Like To See In ‘Indiana Jones 5’

1. A Satisfying Passing of the Torch

But of course, this won’t be the end. Disney’s not in the business of finishing franchises, and Indiana Jones will continue to have adventures until all of us are dead. With or without Spielberg, with or without Ford, there will be more Indiana Jones movies. And they will be Indiana Jones movies, not some supporting character bumped up to take over the series. It’s the name and the hat and the whip that sell tickets, and you’re not going to get that with a legacy character. So if you can’t keep pushing Indy into the future, the only way to go is to take him back to the past.

If you want to keep making Indy movies forever, you have to go back to the 1930s and recast the role. If you drop the convention of listing a specific year at the beginning of the film, Indiana Jones can run around fighting Nazis and discovering supernatural artifacts in that early WWII period in perpetuity. Again, these things shouldn’t be strictly serialized, so if the continuity is kind of a mess, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Indy is back in the setting that people respond to having a whole slew of new adventures.

The question, then, is how to handle that passing of the torch. I’m still somewhat partial to Devin Faraci’s Godfather II-esque idea of intercutting Indy’s present day adventure with one he went on back in the ‘30s, but the trick will definitely be to get people to fall in love with this new version of the character before he headlines his own movie. Again, we need only look at The Force Awakens to see how powerful this formula can be. Get people in the door with the thing they’re already familiar with and then get ‘em attached to the new thing so they come back next time.

As much as I may think it’s a bad idea to keep making Indiana Jones movies, there’s not much I can do to stop it. The best I can hope for is that they’ll find a way to do it right, to make it fresh and exciting and do for this dead and buried series what they’ve already done for Star Wars. Five years ago I thought Star Wars was scorched earth, incapable of bearing healthy fruit, but now I’m maybe more excited about it than I’ve ever been in my life. If Star Wars can come back from the dead, maybe my favorite film series can do the same. I remain skeptical, but it’d be a hell of a thing if they managed to get this right.