I think it’s flopping for multiple reasons:
A. An overcrowded summer marketplace where every film is cannibalizing the next. Yes, I know cinemas haven’t fully recovered, but in even normal times I think many of these films that are flopping would still struggle.
B. The movie that came before it, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, was awful so it didn’t exactly make any new fans or encourage people to come back. It made over $800M which is a VERY impressive gross, which is more like a billion today, adjusted for inflation.
C. Dial of Destiny itself is mediocre.
D. Its budget should be like $175M, NOT $300M.
Think about it this way, Top Gun Maverick never would have made as much as it did if the summer movie line-up was this crowded last year, nor would it have likely even made half of what it did if it wasn’t a fantastic movie, regardless of the nostalgia for the original. Both the hype leading up to it and word-of-mouth exploded it into what it was.
There’s no hype for this movie. There’s no niche it has carved out (Avatar 2 promising an immersive experience, Mission Impossible with great writing and incredible stunt work, etc.) as it’s basically just a generic adventure film unlike Raiders and the Last Crusade which are groundbreaking adventure films. That’s not to say you can’t have great films flop due to poor marketing or lack of demand (see Blade Runner 2049), but it is in my view a great point to make about Indy 5 specifically since it already has proven success, but diminishing quality. The early reactions at Cannes for Dial of Destiny sucked. It’s just bland. People are sick of those kinds of movies, and we see that with Ant-Man 3, Transformers, and The Flash all doing poorly.
Mission: Impossible and even John Wick also proves that if you make better and better quality films, more and more people will come.
I view this partially like Alice in Wonderland’s gross vs. Alice Into The Looking Glass. The sequel did so bad because the first was awful so it didn’t sell people on an awful sequel, in fact, it directly hurt the brand.
Am I being excessively harsh? Maybe, but why drop money on a mediocre adventure film at best when you have revolutionary films like Spider-Verse 2 competing with it, and streaming services with unlimited content at home?
), then they should really look into continuing it through animation. Spider-Verse has proven that American audiences are open to action oriented animations that aren’t entirely aimed at kids. Let’s continue the Indiana Jones series in that fashion. Nothing in the adventure film genre has been able to live up to the Indiana Jones series, it should live on for generations to come.
