Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny closed out Harrison Ford’s run as the character but underperformed badly at the box office, reportedly costing Disney well over $100 million. The franchise has been mostly quiet ever since. Outside of the well-received Indiana Jones and the Great Circle video game, there’s been no clear signal about where Indy goes without Ford. The silence finally broke at San Diego Comic-Con this week, though the answer isn’t a new movie or a Disney+ series.
At San Diego Comic-Con’s Lucasfilm Publishing panel on Jul. 24, Marvel editor-in-chief C.B. Cebulski announced a five-issue limited series (Indiana Jones and the Sword of Pandemonium) launching in December 2026 and set directly after Raiders of the Lost Ark. It marks the character’s first Marvel comic in over three decades. Disney has owned Lucasfilm since 2012 and flooded shelves with Star Wars comics almost immediately, yet Indy never got the same treatment. Even Dial of Destiny was released without a tie-in book, which feels like an odd call for a property this well known. Whatever the internal reasoning was, it seems to have changed. As for the story, Marvel’s official synopsis reads:
“In the wake of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy’s most notorious villains, including the impossible return of an archenemy, seek a terrifying new source of power to recoup their loss—one that’s fallen into the hands of his former companion, Marion Ravenwood. Now, Indiana Jones has to race to the far corners of the globe in search of a biblical weapon, embarking on an epic quest that will put both his archeology skills and skepticism of the supernatural to the ultimate test!”
Two things in that synopsis deserve a closer look. The first is Marion being called Indy’s former companion, which quietly points at one of the series’ oldest unanswered questions regarding their relationship. Raiders ends with the two of them together, yet by Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, they’d been apart for decades, and no film ever bothered to explain the split.
If the new story is laying groundwork for that breakup, it would be the first official attempt to address it, and a comic is a better venue for that kind of connective tissue than a movie would ever be. The second is the “impossible return of an archenemy” line, which is a fun tease mostly because Raiders was not gentle with its villains. Anyone coming back from that finale has some explaining to do, though this is also a franchise where a face-melting Ark is standard equipment, so the supernatural loophole is presumably available.
Marvel is framing the series as the start of an “all-new era of comic book adventures for the iconic archaeologist” set during the original films. The publisher explored much the same stretch of Indy’s timeline in The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones in the 1980s. What Lucasfilm has not said yet is whether this new run will connect in any way to those earlier post-Raiders stories or simply tell its own version of events. Either way, the franchise is moving again. Starting small might be the most sensible thing Lucasfilm has done with the character in years.