Hacker Cinema
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
2023 · Film · 155 min
Part of Indiana Jones Collection
Directed by James Mangold
Finding himself in a new era, and approaching retirement, Indy wrestles with fitting into a world that seems to have outgrown him. But as the tentacles of an all-too-familiar evil return in the form of an old rival, Indy must don his hat and pick up his whip once more to make sure an ancient and powerful artifact doesn't fall into the wrong hands.
6 negativefrom 6 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
7 comments on Hacker News
I don't see this as being better or worse than all the reboots, remakes, and pointless sequels for movies that make the bulk (in financing) of Hollywood's present production: these also make the same "assumptions" of how some idea should look like. In fact, I think they make it even worst.
Give me "An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip, as if he was defeated by the righteous fight against patriarchy by a strong, independent woman, that is better at everything than he is": Sure, here is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny for you.
In fact, when generative video evolve enough, it will usher an era of creativity where people that previously were kept out of the little self pleasing circle of Hollywood, will be able to come up with their own idea for a script and make a decent movie out of it.
Not that I believe AI will be able to display properly the range of emotions of a truly great actor, but, for 99% of movies, it will be just fine. A lot of good movies rely mostly on the script anyway.
> This is a sad outcome. The Bond franchise is very strong
Even back in the Broccoli years, Bond was garbage. The movie bond was a government assassin who we all pretended wasn't. Because sex. Ridiculous!
To Americans he also seemed smart and worldly. Because he had a British accent. Which sexy women liked. True, yet also ridiculous!
Can AMZN bury this relic faster than Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was reburied? Rate to find out!
From here:
https://filmthreat.com/news/male-and-pale-is-stale-responses-to-an-open-letter-to-the-wga/
As a result, the money generated by the industry has seen a remarkably noticeable drop. The rise of the term “flop buster” (in response to so many films like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny underperforming at the box office) seems to be directly related to mainstream audiences’ wholesale rejection of the over-messaging they see hijacking entertainment. addresses your "it's just nature of Box Office" flopping argument
You can be mean to people too! However, if you want to model the corporations correctly, you'll not go very far by thinking they are soulless machines. Most of the reasons corporations fail is people making awful decisions than help themselves personally, and harm long term corporate value.
As for low-quality content, I work with people that have made very bad entertainment. Nobody starts out thinking they'll make something bad. There might be some lowering of standards when, say, the voice acting manager and the voice actor decide that it's not coming out right, and there's no budget to try another 3 days.CGI gets planned for some amount, and when time and a half that is spent, Leia still looks like she is made of plastic. Maybe the writing sounded good to a decision maker, but they had terrible taste. Nobody tries to make it bad, but sometimes we get to choose between bad, and probably still mediocre, and massively unprofitable.
That was Disney's problem this year. A lot of content was super expensive: Go look at the budget for Dial of Destiny, or the per-episode cost of she-hulk. So high that they'd have to be the most viewed things ever to have a prayer at being worthwhile. People were trying their best, and the output wasn't a total embarrassment... but they were all money losers.
They'd probably need to spend another $70-$100 million promoting it. So they need to get let's say $170 million returned to the studio to break even. The judgement must be that they won't achieve that.
For example, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny failed commercially at the box office:
https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Indiana-Jones-and-the-Dial-of-Destiny-(2023)#tab=summary
Disney spent $300 million making it and will have spent at least $100 million promoting it. And it only generated $381 million of revenue at the box office. The studio doesn't get $381 million back, they get a percentage.
Disney may have made up some of the deficit with home video purchases and streaming subscriptions, but seems likely that they've lost $100+ million on that movie for now:
https://variety.com/2023/film/news/indiana-jones-5-mission-impossible-7-box-office-flops-explained-1235690262/
The main problem was lack of budget discipline. $381 million at the box office would have been a decent result if the production budget was more like $50 million.
When I first learned of the movie, I thought it would be a small/indi film that I'd have to dig up from my local library archives. Then I learned it was going to be a "blockbuster" and had mixed feelings - still pretty excited! I'm sure there will be about a dozen "that's not how it was in the book" moments but whatever, can't be worse than the last movie I saw at the theater (Dial of Destiny)
It was a pointless endeavor.
The practical outcome of all of this work is that Indiana Jones 5 is a commercial flop. Its production budget was $300 million (some estimates have it at $325 million), they may have spent another $100 million promoting it, and it is not on track to make that money back:
https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Indiana-Jones-and-the-Dial-of-Destiny-(2023)#tab=summary
For a movie to be commercially successful it needs to be budgeted responsibly. Wasting money on silly efforts like de-aging does not lead to financial success. You're much better off writing a story that doesn't require de-aging in the first place.