“In hindsight, you’re probably right.”
David Koepp, the screenwriter of ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’, the fourth installment of the saga, has admitted that it may have been a mistake to include aliens in the film.
The fourth Indiana Jones film was released in 2008, nearly three decades after Harrison Ford’s first appearance as Dr. Henry Walton/Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The film took place two decades after the events of the previous film, ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’, and saw Indy search for a legendary Crystal Skull.
Indiana’s fourth adventure saw him come face to face with extraterrestrial threats, aliens, and it went in a direction that writer David Koepp admitted he wasn’t exactly a fan of.
Speaking recently on the Script Apart podcast, Koepp talked about the fourth installment in the franchise alreadyadmitted that he even tried to convince George Lucas and Steven Spielberg that the aliens should be cut from the film.
“I was never happy with the idea [de incluir criaturas extraterrestres en ‘El Reino de la calavera de cristal'”, explicó. “Cuando entré, traté de convencer [al director Spielberg y al co-creador de la franquicia Lucas] to change it. She had another idea. They didn’t want to change it.”
While Koepp didn’t share his own story idea, he did acknowledge that in hindsight, it’s clear that aliens and Indiana Jones probably don’t mix.
“I’m not saying that mine would have been better“, he added, “but I think a lot of the pushback that movie received, in a broader sense, apart from the little things that people might not have liked, it was too dumb or whatever, the biggest was that (fans said) ‘We didn’t feel aliens had to have been in an Indiana Jones movie’.
“Fair enough, in hindsight you’re probably right,” he said and laughed.
Now, nearly 15 years after that questionable history, Ford is set to reprise his role (at 80) as the whip-cracking, fedora-wearing hero in a fifth film.
The upcoming sequel will be directed by director James Mangold, who also co-wrote the screenplay with playwright Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth. This does appear to be the final film in the franchise with Ford at the helm, and story details are still being kept under wraps for now… though we can assume from past efforts that there are no aliens.
Indiana Jones 5 is scheduled to be released on June 23, 2023.
Source: Fotogramas
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
