In the media whirlwind that surrounded Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, there was a lot of talk about a fifth Indy movie. George Lucas said he’d be all for it, and the general consensus was that Shia LaBeouf was being groomed to eventually take over the franchise, especially given the rumors that both Harrison Ford and LaBeouf were signed on for multiple movies. This is old news.

But the comments Mr. Lucas made about the franchise recently in an interview with The Sunday Times are pretty interesting, and they beg an awful lot of questions. From the article, on how the fourth Indy movie came to be:

“It was a challenge getting the story together and getting everybody to agree on it. Indiana Jones only becomes complicated when you have another two people saying ‘I want it this way’ and ‘I want it that way’, whereas, when I first did Jones, I just said, ‘We’ll do it this way’ — and that was much easier. But now I have to accommodate everybody, because they are all big, successful guys, too, so it’s a little hard on a practical level. If I can come up with another idea that they like, we’ll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension. This recent one came out of that. It’s kind of a hybrid of our own two ideas, so we’ll see where we are able to take the next one.”

As a side note, I should point out that I am NOT one of those geeks who harbors all kinds of resentment towards Lucas, about the Star Wars prequels, or how he has tweaked the original movies a million times. Star Wars is and always was his baby, and he revisited the story to flesh out the universe in a way that he felt made more sense. Fine. And I am a fan of the prequels, and for the most part the changes to Episodes IV-VI on the DVDs aren’t all that bad. Except for Greedo shooting “at the same time” as Han. Han shot Greedo, and Greedo never fired. Ever. But the rest of the tweaks don’t really bother me that much.

But getting back to Indy. The original movies were the result of a collaboration between Lucas and Spielberg, so why is he saying that with the first movies, it was all done exactly the way he wanted? On Raiders, Lucas, Spielberg and Philip Kaufman came up with the story, and Lawrence Kasdan is credited with the screenplay. And from what I remember from the bonus features on the DVD (and please someone correct me if I’m wrong), but wasn’t Lucas sort of hands off once the filming started? Wasn’t it more Spielberg, the director, who was running the show?

And what does he mean that Spielberg wasn’t that enthusiastic about Skull? He seems to mean that Spielberg didn’t want to make the movie, which is hard to believe given all the interviews with him gushing about how much he loves the character and how he couldn’t wait to bring him back. Then George goes on to say that he wants to take Indy into the future, and that his buddy Steve wants to bring him back to the past. Is that referring to the way the fourth film was more in the vain of 50’s era sci-fi B movies, while the original movies leaned towards the serials of the 1930’s? Or is he referring to the use of CGI and special effects, which were far more heavily used in Skull?

I really, really would love to find out what George meant by these things. As I’ve said before, I think the thing that hurt Skull the most was that so long had past between it and the first trilogy, and it’s hard to not wish they had either left well enough alone after Crusade or had continued making fresh Indy movies every few years, akin to the James Bond franchise. But it all begs the question, if it took Georgie, Stevie, and Harry almost two decades to agree on how to make a fourth movie, what makes it so likely that they’ll all agree on the direction of a fifth, sixth, or seventh? At some point, might someone have to give up a little bit of creative influence? The geek consensus would be that it should be Lucas, but I would put my money on Ford – he is *just* the actor, after all.

As much as I didn’t like Skull, there’s a small part of me that thinks if they continued the series in a new and creative way in the future, it might make Skull make more sense retroactively, and sort of redeem that movie, at least a little.

What do you think? Should they go forward with the franchise? And if so, how?