Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny's Cannes Debut (Need We Revise the Box Office Prediction for Indiana Jones 5?)

These past few days I have had (as writer about this summer's films for this blog, at least) my attention on Guardians of the Galaxy 3's third weekend, Fast X's debut, and the Boxoffice Pro forecast for The Flash.

Indiana Jones 5's Cannes world premiere slipped my mind.

But it did happen. And the first reviews are out.

When I made my prediction for how Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (aka Indiana Jones 5) would do at the box office I went by what the prior films in the series made, the downward trend in their domestic grosses, the proportion of domestic to foreign gross. On that basis I anticipated a domestic gross of perhaps $400 million, matched by another $600 million internationally for a $1 billion take. This was about a fifth down from the series' peak with Raiders of the Lost Ark, so I set that movie's gross (about $1.25 billion in today's terms) as an upper end to the plausible range, and going by the same "margin of error," suggested $750 million as the range's bottom end

I also guessed that the movie's making under $1 billion was more likely than its making more than $1 billion because the film seemed to face a lot of headwinds (as an aged franchise with an aged audience that may be a tough sell to younger folks less attached to it and leerier of period pieces; cynicism about a fifth Jones film, a new director, Lucasfilm under Disney management; unattraction to the particular choice of theme, setting, personnel attached, be it having the director of Logan do the movie, or including Phoebe Waller-Bridge; etc.). Indeed, the film had enough against it that I did not rule out a Solo-like collapse (you know, what happened the last time a character Harrison Ford played in earlier years had a Lucasfilm adventure with Ms. Waller-Bridge).

Considering all this it seems worth returning to the point of comparison that Top Gun 2 has been for many of the more optimistic watchers of this film's prospects. While so far as I can tell the entertainment press prefers to ignore the fact in favor of a Rah-rah attitude toward the Top Gun sequel's success at the American box office, that movie succeeded as well as it did because it had comparatively slight box office competition in the summer of 2022; and the cheerleading of that media behind it.

Indiana Jones 5, like every other movie out this summer, was never going to have the kind of comparatively open field Top Gun 2 did. Now we also see that it does not have the press cheerleading for it. The movie's Rotten Tomatoes scores stands at a franchise low--very low--50 percent, a fact which seems the more ominous given that this was a movie that, given its shaky appeal, really needed that; and that, certainly to go by what I saw for the immediately preceding film in the series Indiana Jones 4 (the critics' score was a "fresh" 77 percent, the audience score a "rotten" 53 percent), the critics may be far kinder to the film than the general public.

Moreover, the specific remarks the critics offer regarding the film in many cases specifically confirm what many feared about the movie--that it is an unnecessary and mediocre, "box-ticking" addition to the saga, heavily reliant on the audience's fondness for its predecessors, even as it misses what people actually love about them, and even undermines them in what Nicholas Barber's review for the BBC called not just a movie that feels like "fan fiction [or] a tie-in video game," but a "gloomy and depressing" close to the series. (I might add that just as Mr. Barber's remarks would seem to confirm those who were skeptical of the director of Logan doing a movie about Indiana Jones in old age, those who groaned at the thought of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's involvement in the project are also likely to feel they were right to do so.)

So yes: even if some would still have us believe Indy's next adventure could play like Top Gun 2, if I was thinking $750 million-$1 billion was more likely than $1 billion+ back at the start of April (with Solo-like collapse, if not likely not wholly ruled out) my assessment leans still more heavily in that direction (as I upgrade even the prospect of Solo-like collapse, still unlikely, but less unlikely-looking than before these reports).

And I am not expecting that to change--at least, in the upward direction.

Still, we will see what Boxoffice Pro has to say about the opening weekend in response to the first evidence of the public's actual willingness to buy a ticket.