Steven Spielberg Hints at a Fifth ‘Indiana Jones’

Steven Spielberg is a man with the powers of a god. As the visionary behind some of the most universally beloved film properties of the 20th century, he wields an unfathomable influence over the legions of movie geeks who hold his populist successes as holy gospel. All it takes from the director to move millions of hearts to flutter is words, simple words. No matter if they’re part of a totally offhand comment during an interview, hinting at a project with no actual traction in pre-production, with actors who have most certainly aged out of the capacity to perform feats of dazzling derring-do. All it takes is a mere utterance of the words “Indiana Jones 5” from Spielberg and we all feel like we’re twelve years old again.

That’s pretty much how it went down when Spielberg sat for an interview with Yahoo! Movies alongside Tom Hanks to promote their new film, Bridge of Spies. In a genial tone, Spielberg joked about his tendency to work with the same leading men from picture to picture, noting that Bridge brings his count with Hanks to four, matching Harrison Ford’s four films with Spielberg. Then, as if they were any other words in the world, he went on to add, “Now, I’ll probably do an Indy 5 with Harrison, so then it’ll be five for Harrison, four for Tom.” The only way he could’ve been more casual with even bigger news would’ve been if he had followed up with, “Oh, and Biden’s stepping down. Your good buddy El Spielbergo’s gonna be the next VP.”

This isn’t exactly the first we’ve heard of a rumored fifth installment to the Indiana Jones franchise, though it’s the first missive directly from the Academy Award-winning horse’s mouth. In a Vanity Fair piece from May, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy stated her plans for a fifth entry, though there was no script in the works and those plans really amounted to “talking about” the possibility. Pulling off yet another film with everyone’s favorite globetrotting archaeologist could be prohibitively tricky; it’s not as if Kingdom of the Crystal Skull left everybody clamoring for more, though perhaps enough time has elapsed that we’ve collectively forgiven and forgotten. But the flip side of that time passed is Ford himself. There were plenty of getting-too-old-for-this-shit jokes to be made when the greying Ford took up the whip and fedora for Skull, and that was in 2008. Seven years and one reality-check plane accident later, and Ford may not be up to the stunts that endeared him to generations when the franchise first began. But then again, Indiana Jones is a collector of rare artifacts. More than anyone, he understands the intrinsic value of something old without any immediately apparent uses.