Indiana Jones and Box Office Collapse
Holy hopping hippos!
This is an abject catastrophe for LucasFilm and Disney.
Three weeks out from the launch date and this is the box office projection??
$60 Million!?!?!?!
The only way the box office projo could be lower is if people are frightened of a terrorist attack. This isn’t a prediction of a box office crater, this is a box office journey to the center of the Earth.
This fairly questionable premise of Old Indy’s Last Round-Up started life as a vanity project for Harrison Ford. He wanted Chris Pratt fired off the franchise that he started back in 1980. About the only thing he may have wanted beyond that was a farewell, Oscar. He’s never won an academy award in his sixty-year acting career, which is why I suspect this thing has James Mangold directing and a godawful running time that is going to be a chore for me to get through.
The real disaster here is the Hindenberg size budget. It initially wasn’t supposed to cost more than the $200-$250 million that most of the Disney “blockbusters” cost. The problem was that while Harrison Ford is spry for a man his age, he is a man his age, when you are past 75 years old you can break something major just getting out of bed.
However, Ford ripped up his shoulder badly during a rehearsal. He was out for months.
The thing is movie productions are insured for this very reason. Once it was clear just how badly injured Harrison Ford was, Disney/LucasFilm should have just pulled the plug on the production, collected the insurance check, and moaned publically about what might have been. I am honestly shocked that a man with an abacus for a heart like Bob Chapek decided to push forward with the project despite the fact that this would push the budget well past $300 million. Possibly as high as $350 million.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is now in that rarified club of movies that have to cross the $1 billion mark before it sees a penny in profit.
Perhaps Kathleen Kennedy was optimistic because, with the exception of Solo, all of her Star Wars movies had done that.
21 days from launch that optimism now seems ill-founded at best.
Perhaps a title change would help?
Indiana Jones and Dead Man Walking
