Is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Going to Be the No Time to Die of the Indiana Jones Series?

The kind of adventure Indiana Jones represented when he first appeared, was, like Star Wars, a throwback to adventure serials and World War II movies in a time when people who grew up on the stuff were a significant demographic--and imbued with a nostalgia for that content as strong as the nostalgia for the '50s, the '60s, the '70s, the '80s were to be in later decades. (Certainly reading through the classics of spy fiction I was struck again and again by how much World War II stuff we got in the 1970s.)

There was less of that about in subsequent decades, in which Indiana Jones-type period adventure looked more anomalous--in part because the fashion for such adventure Indiana Jones started proved a lot less durable than the fashionability for outer space and sci-fi action-adventure Star Wars started (which has since had ups and downs, but never really disappeared), while in 1989 the heroes literally riding off into the sunset, such that Indy was no longer around to keep propping it up the way new Star Wars films have. Indeed, anyone much under forty is unlikely to have seen more than one Indiana Jones film in the theater, if that, with that particular film unprepossessing. (It does not seem irrelevant here that the young are especially tough sells on period pieces these days.)

None of that takes anything away from the status of the prior Indiana Jones films, and especially the first three, as classics of the action-adventure form that did much to establish the genre as we know it, and continue to enjoy a good deal of affection from fans. But as the James Bond films that were a significant inspiration for Indiana Jones demonstrate, past glories of this kind are a poor basis indeed for keeping a franchise going from hit to hit, and it is not for nothing that doubts abound about how the audience will take this latest installment in the franchise. Indeed, it seems possible that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will be to the saga what No Time to Die has been to the rebooted James Bond film--a belated fifth installment by a new director that closed the saga on a less than triumphant note from the perspectives of box office, critics and fans alike, as the demographics of the audience affirm that the long-declining franchise's audience has aged right along with it rather than replenishing itself by winning new fans.