Indiana Jones Sequel Set To Bomb At Box Office
$60 million might not be chump change to you or me, but for the so-called finale (I thought the Crystal Skull mess was supposed to be the last one 15 years ago) of a popular franchise, the box office this weekend for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is being considered a disaster in Hollywood. Via Deadline:
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is still bound to open at the bottom of end of tracking’s projection of $60M as this morning. I saw an estimate in The Flash vicinity of $55M last night and took an Alka Seltzer out of shock. Hopefully, Dial of Destiny doesn’t fall apart tonight, and at least stays on course for a Mission: Impossible – Fallout type opening in the $60M range over three days. That figure might be good for exhibition and popcorn sales over the five-day holiday weekend, but it stinks for a movie that has a reported cost of $250M to near $300M before P&A.
However, since the movie premiered to lackluster reviews at Cannes, and landed like a wet towel on tracking three weeks ago, and didn’t budge its projections despite having significantly louder marketing and publicity global campaign than The Flash, including $90M from promotional partners — it’s been baffling how a storied franchise can end on a downer note at the box office in its finale.
[Deadline]
Without Spielberg as director, I had already decided I wouldn’t be seeing this one. Then the bad reviews came in, confirming I made the right choice.
The only movies that make money now are reboots, cartoons, or comic book/super hero trash aimed at brain dead teens. Or brain dead 20-somethings. There are plenty of those, too. People who care about Indiana Jones are all over 40 now, and we don’t go to movie theaters. (I especially don’t go, given that we’re still in the middle of a raging pandemic.) That being said, as a movie lover, the below top 10 of 2023 makes me want to die:
Horrifying.
Compare the 2023 nightmare of sequels, comic books, video games, and cartoons to 1982, when the first Indiana Jones movie came out, via BoxOfficeMojo:
With the exception of Rocky and Star Trek, we had all original films, all of which are now considered classics. Poltergeist was the original suburban haunted house horror blockbuster, E.T. is one of the greatest movies of all time, Raiders is a personal all-time fave, and we even had Dolly Parton running a brothel. Oscar-winning dramas like On Golden Pond and Officer and a Gentleman with actual dialogue and acting wouldn’t be caught dead in 2023. Even Porky’s, a raunchy teen comedy where a guy gets his dick stuck in a peep hole while spying on the girl’s locker room, was more original than literally anything in 2023’s top 10. Plus, Porky’s had “Meat,” one of the first male movie characters to make me question my sexuality as a little kid. The trailer:
