{"id":530974,"date":"2026-01-21T00:10:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T00:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/530974\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T00:10:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T00:10:12","slug":"indiana-jones-comeback-was-never-going-to-be-easy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/530974\/","title":{"rendered":"Indiana Jones’ Comeback Was Never Going to Be Easy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week saw the official departure of Kathleen Kennedy<\/a> from Lucasfilm after a decades-long tenure. In the aftermath, we learned a few things<\/a>, including Lucasfilm trying to get two\u00a0Indiana Jones projects<\/a> off the ground: an animated series set between the earlier movies, and a show about Abner Ravenwood, Indy\u2019s mentor and the father of his eventual wife, Marion.<\/p>\n

But for reasons we currently don\u2019t know, neither manifested. Either way, the last few years have been weird for Harrison Ford\u2019s adventurer: 2023\u2019s\u00a0Dial of Destiny\u00a0underperformed<\/a>, and 2024\u2019s\u00a0Indiana Jones & the Great Circle<\/a> 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\u00a0positioned as the last to star Ford and developer MachineGames returning to <\/a>Wolfenstein<\/a>,\u00a0it\u2019ll be a while before another adventure, which Kennedy herself told Deadline<\/a>: \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody\u2019s interested right now, but I don\u2019t think Indy will ever be done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indiana is one of Ford\u2019s most well-known roles, but doesn\u2019t elicit quite the same response as Han Solo. A lot of that can probably be attributed to time; the original Star Wars\u00a0came out years before\u00a0Raiders of the Lost Ark, and those original movies wrapped years before the Indy\u00a0films did. Han was first, Indiana was second, and the culture\u2019s generally wrapped around this idea\u2014more characters in media probably exist in Han\u2019s 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<\/a>\u00a0that did a lot of heavy lifting until their return to the big screen.<\/p>\n

\"IndianajonesImage: Bethesda <\/p>\n

The type of action-adventure stories done in Indiana Jones\u00a0gradually faded across mediums, with video games being the last holdout.\u00a0Tomb Raider\u00a0and\u00a0Uncharted were\u00a0two of the biggest projects made in Indiana\u2019s mold, with\u00a0Uncharted\u00a0unable (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\u00a0Indiana\u00a0for its second go, Tomb Raider and Uncharted had several new games and remasters released, Sophie Turner\u2019s playing Lara<\/a> 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\u00a0movie<\/a> a hit likely accelerated its plans to do another game, regardless of whether Drake\u2019s actually the lead.<\/p>\n

Animation and television weren\u2019t going to be the magic bullets that propelled Indiana Jones into mainstream greatness; it\u2019s not\u00a0Predator, where it has an endless well of ideas to craft whole movies around, just as it\u2019s also not Star Wars, where its universe is big enough to spotlight anyone with vague connections to the title character. Instead, it\u2019s more like Tron, which only could\u2019ve been what we consider a \u201ctrue franchise\u201d 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\u2014there\u2019s a world where Ford\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Like Kennedy said, there\u2019s a chance we\u2019ve 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<\/a> may determine whether Lucasfilm gets the ball rolling on bringing Indy back. By then, the other big question after \u201cWho will play him?\u201d will be, \u201cDoes Disney know what to do with the franchise now?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel<\/a>, Star Wars<\/a>, and Star Trek<\/a> releases, what\u2019s next for the DC Universe on film and TV<\/a>, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week saw the official departure of Kathleen Kennedy from Lucasfilm after a decades-long tenure. In the aftermath,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":530975,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,20162,160353,14397,53,185041,235385,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-530974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-indiana-jones","tag-kathleen-kennedy","tag-lucasfilm","tag-movies","tag-tomb-raider","tag-uncharted","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115930190533764988","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/530975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}