The Best Indiana Jones Movie That Was Never Made

The worst Indiana Jones sequel may have been the very best one.

I don’t imply this in a obscure woulda-shoulda-coulda type of means. I imply that the worst Indiana Jones, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Cranium, developed (or perhaps devolved) out of a vastly superior model of the identical idea. This iteration of the fourth Indiana Jones — which options almost all of Crystal Cranium’s key characters and settings, together with an equivalent MacGuffin — was written just a few years prior by an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter in shut session with Steven Spielberg. But it surely was by no means produced.

It will have been titled Indiana Jones and the Metropolis of the Gods. It was written by Frank Darabont, the screenwriter and director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Inexperienced Mile, and later the developer and government producer of The Strolling Lifeless TV collection. In his early days in Hollywood, Darabont labored as a author on The Younger Indiana Jones Chronicles, the short-lived tv collection that exposed Indy’s childhood adventures encountering nice figures of historical past.

When Indiana Jones and the Final Campaign was made in 1989, the franchise’s key gamers — director Spielberg, producer/author George Lucas, and star Harrison Ford — all assumed it would conclude the collection. However inside just a few years, all three males had been inundated with requests from followers to make one other film. All through the Nineteen Nineties, when Lucas wasn’t work on Star Wars Particular Editions or prequels, he tinkered with concepts for a fourth Indiana Jones, and he introduced in varied co-writers to develop the fabric with him.

READ MORE: Indiana Jones Is a Nice Hero As a result of He Is a Whole Failure

Feeling that they had exhausted the Nineteen Thirties journey serials milieu that had served as the idea for the unique Indiana Jones idea — and recognizing that their main man was getting older — Lucas felt a fourth film wanted to attract inspiration from a brand new supply. So he relocated the collection from the Nineteen Thirties to the Nineteen Fifties, and determined that simply as the unique Indy trilogy borrowed from Saturday matinee motion footage, this fourth Indiana Jones would steal from the pulp fiction of the Nineteen Fifties: Specifically paranoid sci-fi motion pictures about atomic horror and alien menaces. Accordingly, whereas Lucas cycled via a number of co-writers on the challenge, he stored instructing them to return to the identical batch of concepts: Indiana Jones battling Russians and encountering proof of alien life amongst historical civilizations.

These directions lead, in 1995, to Jeb Stuart’s Indiana Jones and the Saucer Males From Mars script, which featured a number of the similar components that wound up in Kingdom of the Crystal Cranium — together with Indy surviving a nuclear bomb take a look at by hiding inside a lead-lined fridge — however was far more instantly about Indy combating aliens and alien craft. However then Independence Day opened in theaters, and stole the challenge’s thunder earlier than it received off the bottom. At Spielberg’s behest, Lucas tabled the challenge for some time.

Enter Darabont, who joined the film within the early 2000s and, in accordance with him, wound up spending a whole yr of his life targeted on crafting an Indiana Jones script whereas he “labored very carefully with Steven Spielberg.”

“[I] utilized all my ardour and talent, and gave [Spielberg] a script that he liked,” Darabont later mentioned.

To learn this script, is to grasp why. (You don’t must be a crusading archaeologist to search out it; simply Google the title and it comes proper up.) What’s fascinating about Darabont’s Indiana Jones and the Metropolis of the Gods screenplay is not only how good it’s — and it’s nice – however how significantly better it’s than Kingdom of the Crystal Cranium (not less than on paper) with an virtually equivalent batch of story and thematic components.

Listed below are a number of the most fascinating variations between the 2…

Indiana Jones and the Metropolis of the Gods is a good script. So why didn’t Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford make it?

In line with Darabont, Spielberg wished to. Years later, Darabont mentioned Spielberg “was able to shoot it … it was going to be his subsequent movie. He informed me it was the very best script he’d learn since Raiders of the Misplaced Ark. That is a quote, and I am going to at all times treasure it.”

Lucas, nevertheless, had reservations. “George Lucas learn it, did not prefer it, and threw ice water on the entire thing,” Darabont recalled. “The challenge went down in flames. Steven and I appeared like accident victims the day we received that decision. I definitely do not blame Steven for it. He wasn’t able to overrule George, and would not have overruled him even when he may. He and George have been shut buddies for a very long time, they usually’ve had an settlement for years that no Indiana Jones movie will ever get made except they each utterly agreed on the script. It was simply such an terrible shock, in any case my hopes and energy.”

Darabont additionally mentioned that the failure of Metropolis of the Gods was “emotionally devastating” and known as it a “principal cause” he stopped doing work-for-hire writing gigs and commenced to focus completely on tasks he may management. So not solely did we lose out on a doubtlessly nice Indiana Jones sequel, we additionally missed out on different scripts Darabont might need written afterwards. As a substitute they continue to be misplaced without end, just like the Ark of the Covenant in an huge Military warehouse crammed with unmarked crates.