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In the age of the reboot, Steven Spielberg wants Chris Pratt as Indiana Jones

By Phil Watson

Photo by Georges Biard/This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Photo by Georges Biard/This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. /
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It’s a time when what is old is new again in Hollywood and Steven Spielberg wouldn’t mind jumping on the reboot train with Chris Pratt as Indiana Jones.

The buzz began last month when Disney reportedly said it would like to revive the Indiana Jones franchise by rebooting it with Guardians of the Galaxy star Chris Pratt in the title role.

Steven Spielberg, who directed the four previous films in the Indiana Jones universe with Harrison Ford in the lead role, would be on board to direct Pratt, provided the script was right.

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Deadline.com, citing sources, reported that Spielberg hopes to direct a fifth Indy movie (as opposed to an indie movie, which is a whole different thing).

The first movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was a box office smash in 1981, with a worldwide box office of almost $390 million.

That prompted Paramount Pictures to go back to the well with the truly ghastly Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984. That film still brought in $333 million, but was not the critical success that the original film was.

In 1989, Spielberg and Ford were back, this time with Sean Connery, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, that rolled the cash registers to the tune of $474.2 million.

The series went into cold storage for almost 20 years before an older Ford was back with Shia LaBeouf in tow for 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It was the second-highest grossing film of the year, with worldwide box office of $786.6 million, and while it opened to generally positive reviews, audience reaction was markedly more mixed.

Reboots are all the rage right now—Superman is being revived for about the 1,203,786th time, Batman is being reborn yet again and J.J. Abrams found box-office gold with a recreation of the Star Trek franchise.

Given those success stories, it’s quite possible we will see every successful film ever made between 1972-99 dusted off, given a good scrubbing and reworked as something brand new and improved (even though nothing can actually be new and improved—it’s either an improved version of the old thing or it’s a new thing, but never both … ah, but I digress).

As far as Chris Pratt as the title character in a rebooted version of Indiana Jones, it could be good, it could be a disaster if Pratt can’t differentiate this character from Starlord.

But if they mess with the theme music, there’s where I will have a problem.

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