Director James Mangold has spoken to Gizmodo about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’s failure to live up to its box office expectations.
“Well, it’s definitely the second,” Mangold told io9 over video chat. “There’s nothing I can do about how much a movie is going to make worldwide in a window of four weeks… other than [interviews] like this … Our grosses were very much in keeping with other films of similar ilk this last summer and none of them featured a hero who was both Harrison’s age and also was a franchise that had been dormant for 20 years.”
Mangold recalled, and maybe pined for, the days of Starlog and Cinefantastique, when film reporting “was about what people liked and didn’t like and what inspired them.” However, he admitted, “At some point, everything became the Wall Street Journal.” Now box office numbers are treated as the end-all be-all of a film’s success when history has made it very clear that is not always the case.
The director also pointed to one of the most important flies in the ointment when it comes to discussions of box office, especially in the past few years. “A lot of what expectations are based on is also what movies cost,” he said. “And I think it’s not just true of our film, but others. We made these films during a time of covid. In the case of Indy, they had already been prepping a different movie and had spent a lot of money before we even started. And so it’s just hard to make large-scale movies when world travel was decreased and you could be shut down at any moment by one person in your crew testing positive. And I thought it was heroic of all the studios to keep pushing on and making these pictures despite that, even though they were all costing 20 or 30% more than they would have if they had been made at another time.” This, of course, is rarely mentioned when lamenting the box office grosses of films today but Mangold understands. “Because it hurts the story,” he said. “Why get involved in those nuances?”
Stream Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny on Disney+ and/or buy the film on 4K UHD, Blu-Ray, and DVD from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Listen to our thoughts on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and the UK premiere on RADIO 1138.
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