Daf

Was going to chime in how often WB estimates would come in 1-2 mill over the actual number (or used to, anyway) but then I remembered this one was Universal.

Has there been any post-release industry scuttlebutt about any kind of fallout over this? Feels oddly quiet on that front. Though I suppose this is more of a "death by a thousand papercuts" situation rather than a Heaven's Gate type of thing where there's an easy and obvious scapegoat to point to. Then again, maybe everyone's just waiting for the end of the financial year... Something that strikes me in hindsight is that this project wasn't treated at all like a franchise film by Disney, and from what I hear they were never particularly interested in Indiana Jones as a property (even if mostly because Paramount still has some kind of stake in it). This was definitely a one-off the entire way, with pretty much zero attempt to reach any new/young audience at all in the marketing or the production itself. The impression I get is that this was a prestige picture of sorts for the studio. Despite all the ostensible action scenes I did not come out of the theater feeling like I'd just seen an action movie. Seems to me they treated the project more like some kind of epic period piece drama with a lot of scenes that look and feel an awful lot like a rollicking Indiana Jones adventure but were never fully committed to actually being one, and that that was by design. Even the choice of director and the two major co-stars (Waller-Bridge and Mikkelson) feel more like appealing to "credibility" than marketability. And of course, the laser-focus on Harrison Ford and HIS FINAL TURN AS INDIANA JONES SERIOUSLY HE MIGHT DIE SOON, the push to debut it so early at Cannes, etc... ...I guess where I'm going with this is I suspect the ultimate plan was to try to get Harrison Ford an Oscar, lol.

Barbie's been an icon a lot longer than Indiana Jones has, lol! But in any case, it's dumb to make artificial competitions like this.

Frankly I have no idea what you're talking about. Why do you think Dial of Destiny is a deconstruction of Indiana Jones?

All the Gore Verbinski chat is amusing to me. To me he'll always be first and foremost the man who directed The Ring.

I'm not sure you could get everyone to agree "it should never have been made" about ANY movie, lol

I sense a lot of "coping" energy from the thread, so I thought I'd offer some box office salve posting of my own. In my years of box office watching there are a couple things I've come to understand about flopping: Flopping is inevitable. Every series will flop eventually. Oh, you say your franchise hasn't flopped? You're right, it hasn't... yet. The only way to evade the Flop Reaper is to quit while you're ahead. It comes for us all. I don't care if you're Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, if you keep pressing your luck at some point you'll get a wammy. (About the only continuous long-runner you could say has escaped outright flopdom is James Bond thanks to its wide international reach, but even that series has had its share of weak performers in key markets and faced periods of popular irrelevance). Flopping means shockingly little in the long run. I've seen so many of my favorite franchises suffer humiliating box office defeats, Alien, Scream, Pokemon, Star Trek, the list goes on, and not one of them has been "killed" by it. Even if it goes into a state of dormancy, flopping is not going to rewrite the history books so its entry becomes "(x) is a dead media franchise that at one point was briefly popular but it was actually just a big fluke and in the end it was a huge failure mwahahaha." The sting of flopping eventually subsides and becomes merely a trivia point. We still get Tarzan and Peter Pan movies, for crying out loud! There's a damn Dracula movie coming out in a couple months! Hell, it may take another twenty years, but I guarantee you somebody's eventually gonna give The Lone Ranger another go, too. Nothing ever really dies, at worst it just becomes history. Anyways, I know we all know this, but some box office chicken soup sounds good at the moment. I've been here before. If Indy 5 flops, all it really means is that people are satisfied with the series and don't necessarily need more. It'll get shown on TV, played on streaming, and included in box sets all the same, and regardless Harrison Ford's been on a months-long publicity tour where he gets showered with love and appreciation at every stop so I think he's fine.

Ok sure, but even the actual Detective Pikachu game only sold like half a million when mainline Pokemon titles do like 15 milllion. It's the Ewok Adventure of the Pokemon franchise. Or more like "Lando Calrissean: Private Eye in Hawaii." I'll stop the derail but I thought I'd finally gotten over the ridiculousness of that movie's existence but it still has some surprises for me!

I wasn't paying much attention to Detective Pikachu's hype and reception but this is the first I'm hearing that it was any kind of a disappointment at the box office. Frankly I was amazed at how well the movie did... I still don't understand how or why such a random movie got made in the first place and how it grossed almost half a billion ww!

Seriously right up 'til the early 2010s or so it very nearly was. It's just Star Wars is by design a more timeless saga/ fantasy universe, while Indiana Jones is tied so directly to a single character (and a single star, at that) and takes place in real-life history. There's some inherent limits to how much material you can get from Indy (and how much of it you would actually want). I'd also caution against the thinking that a piece of media's ability to produce successful sequels should be a serious metric to judge its impact by. The Wizard of Oz had a big flop of a sequel in the 80s (by Disney, amusingly enough) and it'd be crazy to think "well looks like Wizard of Oz just wasn't as iconic as we all thought, tsk tsk. Should've invested that money in something that speaks to kids today, you know, like Masters of the Universe..."

This'll sound silly but I can honestly see all the talk shows going on hiatus this summer having more of an effect on these older star-driven vehicles than we might think. They might not pull huge audiences but they do reach older demographics with disposable income and an interest in popular culture, and when a big star like Ford or Cruise is involved the shows will often try to get some memeworthy viral publicity stunts going. Hell, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Mads Mikkelson could've been making the rounds to warm people up to the new characters and such. Beyond that, they're just way more effective promo than all those awful press junket-style interviews which is pretty much all we have at the moment, which always feel like there's someone pointing a gun at the participants off screen.

In fairness, it wasn't budgeted for $295M, that's just how much they ended up spending from the start of development (like, 8 years ago) when all was said and done.

LOL with the way everyone's talking I was expecting the worst, but hey at least it hasn't fallen from their $60M forecast (and yes LOL that we're at "hey at least it's still $60M") With it opening on Wednesday in some territories and 4th of July the following tuesday I can see the studio PR milking a $100-whatever-million global 7-day extended "weekend" for all its worth to save face.

Ford was adamant for over 30 years that Han Solo should meet a tragic end rather live ever after as Princess Leia's boy toy, and by most accounts wouldn't return unless they gave him that. Sounds to me like he cared a lot.

For whatever it's worth, Crystal Skull also had a curiously backloaded opening weekend, owing in large part to Memorial Day and the atypical Thursday opening. Its Sunday was bigger than either its first or second day, and Memorial Day Monday was still bigger than its opening day! It's possible that the Star Wars prequels were well and truly the only movies that could get the Thursday opening to "work" and not just siphon off from Friday, but Crystal Skull was a decades-long awaited generational dream sequel, you wouldn't think opening a day earlier than usual would matter that much. It does come off a bit like its audience was a bit more leisurely in coming out for it