{"id":640830,"date":"2026-06-16T01:32:26","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T01:32:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/640830\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T01:32:26","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T01:32:26","slug":"spielberg-and-ford-fought-george-lucas-on-the-worst-indiana-jones-sequel-and-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/640830\/","title":{"rendered":"Spielberg and Ford Fought George Lucas on the Worst Indiana Jones Sequel (and Lost)"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s no secret that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull faced resistance from star Harrison Ford<\/a> and director Steven Spielberg on the long road to its 2008 release, and that George Lucas<\/a>\u2019 insistence that aliens could be a viable plot device in the movie was a big part of that resistance.<\/p>\n

Lucas had been pitching Indy vs aliens since the 1990s, and after various writers had worked on scripts for the belated fourquel, David Koepp\u2019s screenplay about Indy reuniting with Marion Ravenwood from Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/a> and discovering he has a son while searching for an alien skull in Peru finally took Lucas\u2019 idea from seed to fruit. But even Koepp admits he took the job with \u201csome trepidation,\u201d and a new oral history of Spielberg\u2019s movies reveals more of the behind-the-scenes battle among the director, Lucas, and Ford.<\/p>\n

Noting that Crystal Skull was a \u201ctough production\u201d for cinematographer Janusz Kami\u0144ski, Lucasfilm\u2019s former president Kathleen Kennedy recently told Vulture<\/a> that \u201cSteven was struggling with that movie. Harrison was struggling with the movie. They didn\u2019t want to do a Raiders movie that involved aliens, and they kind of got into a fight with George about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lucas noted that he had wanted Crystal Skull to be \u201ckind of a War of the Worlds sort of thing,\u201d but that Ford and Spielberg both said they weren\u2019t going to do another sci-fi film, with Spielberg<\/a> already having dabbled with alien shenanigans in 1977\u2019s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1982\u2019s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Ford having already done Lucas\u2019 Star Wars trilogy and Blade Runner<\/a>. Still, Lucas was convinced that a fourth film in the franchise would be the perfect opportunity for everyone\u2019s favorite fedora-wearing archaeologist to do something different. \u201cI said, \u2018Steven, this is perfect because it\u2019s the 1950s, when flying saucers were a whole thing,\u2019 but he said \u2018no.’\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s no secret that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull faced resistance from star Harrison…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640831,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-640830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}