Last week saw the official departure of Kathleen Kennedy from Lucasfilm after a decades-long tenure. In the aftermath, we learned a few things, including Lucasfilm trying to get two Indiana Jones projects off the ground: an animated series set between the earlier movies, and a show about Abner Ravenwood, Indy’s mentor and the father of his eventual wife, Marion.
But for reasons we currently don’t know, neither manifested. Either way, the last few years have been weird for Harrison Ford’s adventurer: 2023’s Dial of Destiny underperformed, and 2024’s Indiana Jones & the Great Circle had millions of players, but murky sales numbers. (As a Game Pass title, the former metric matters more than the latter, however vague it is.) With Dial positioned as the last to star Ford and developer MachineGames returning to Wolfenstein, it’ll be a while before another adventure, which Kennedy herself told Deadline: “I don’t think anybody’s interested right now, but I don’t think Indy will ever be done.”
Indiana is one of Ford’s most well-known roles, but doesn’t elicit quite the same response as Han Solo. A lot of that can probably be attributed to time; the original Star Wars came out years before Raiders of the Lost Ark, and those original movies wrapped years before the Indy films did. Han was first, Indiana was second, and the culture’s generally wrapped around this idea—more characters in media probably exist in Han’s shadow than for Indiana, helped by Star Wars becoming more of a pop culture fixture over the decades. Both franchises branched out to televisions, games, and theme parks, but only one of them had a book presence that did a lot of heavy lifting until their return to the big screen.
Image: Bethesda
The type of action-adventure stories done in Indiana Jones gradually faded across mediums, with video games being the last holdout. Tomb Raider and Uncharted were two of the biggest projects made in Indiana’s mold, with Uncharted unable (or unwilling) to shake off comparisons the way Lara Croft had. (Her Survivor Trilogy then got hit with Uncharted comparisons, bringing things semi-full circle.) In the time it took Lucasfilm to revive Indiana for its second go, Tomb Raider and Uncharted had several new games and remasters released, Sophie Turner’s playing Lara in a new TV show, and both franchises had a movie starring a then-new hot movie star for the younger audiences to latch onto. Naughty Dog may have set Nathan Drake aside in 2016, but Tom Holland making the Uncharted movie a hit likely accelerated its plans to do another game, regardless of whether Drake’s actually the lead.
Animation and television weren’t going to be the magic bullets that propelled Indiana Jones into mainstream greatness; it’s not Predator, where it has an endless well of ideas to craft whole movies around, just as it’s also not Star Wars, where its universe is big enough to spotlight anyone with vague connections to the title character. Instead, it’s more like Tron, which only could’ve been what we consider a “true franchise” had it released more consistently and everyone involved been less picky about when they reunited. However one feels about the final Indiana movies, this is probably the healthiest outlook for the series—there’s a world where Ford’s decades-long, rock-solid resume is half-replaced by him pulling a Liam Neeson and coasting on Indiana sequels or similar movies with the serial numbers filed off.
Like Kennedy said, there’s a chance we’ve not seen the last of Indiana Jones. Crystal Dynamics is taking a multi-pronged approach to bringing back Lara Croft, and the reactions to that show and the two upcoming games may determine whether Lucasfilm gets the ball rolling on bringing Indy back. By then, the other big question after “Who will play him?” will be, “Does Disney know what to do with the franchise now?”
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