George Lucas Knew People Were Going to Hate ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’
George Lucas butted heads with Steven Spielberg on the fourth Indiana Jones movie the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Lucas would eventually get his way, and released the Indiana Jones movie that he wanted fans to see. However, he admitted that he anticipated critical backlash for his choices.
How George Lucas prepared for critic hate for ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’
The 2008 Indiana Jones movie Kingdom of the Crystal Skull took the franchise in a new direction that quite a few fans didn’t enjoy. Although it might’ve been more divisive than his prior Indiana Jones pictures, it wasn’t unanimously planned. The film has a 77% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, showing that at least the majority of the critics felt favorably towards the film. But in terms of the general audience, the fans who liked the film seem to slightly edge out those who didn’t as indicated by its 53% score. Lucas, however, believed critics wouldn’t be very open to the fourth Indiana Jones film.
“I know the critics are going to hate it,” he once told Vanity Fair (via Irish Examiner). “So there’s nothing we can do about that. They hate the idea of making another one. They’ve already made up their minds.”
“The fans are all upset. They’re always going to be upset,” he added. “’Why did he do it like this?’ So you just have to stand by for the bricks and the custard pies.”
However, Lucas tried to temper expectations by asserting that it was all entertainment at the end of the day.
“When you do a movie like this, a sequel that’s very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it’s going to be the Second Coming,” Lucas once said according to ABC News. “And it’s not. It’s just a movie. Just like the other movies. You probably have fond memories of the other movies. But if you went back and looked at them, they might not hold up the same way your memory holds up.”
Lucas explained that his experience with critics and The Phantom Menace showed him how to handle the potential backlash against Crystal Skull.
“When people approach the new Indiana Jones, much like they did with Phantom Menace, they have a tendency to be a little harder on it,” he said. “You’re not going to get a lot of accolades doing a movie like this. All you can do is lose.”
Why George Lucas decided to make ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’
Although Lucas expected Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to receive some hate, that didn’t weigh down on the filmmaking experience at all. The Star Wars creator confided that he didn’t need to do another Indiana Jones film. He simply added another story to its mythology to have a good time. The movie saw a few changes since its inception, with Spielberg’s original idea for the film going up in flames. Still, despite the tension and the arguments surrounding Crystal Skull, Lucas enjoyed making the project.
“We came back to do Indy because we wanted to have fun,” he said. “It’s not going to make much money for us in the end. We all have some money. … It would make a lot of money if you weren’t rich. But we’re not doing it for the money.”
Additionally, he was inspired by a particular decade in Hollywood to make the movie.
“The idea was to take the genre of Saturday-matinee serials, which were popular in the ’30s and ’40s, and say, ‘What kind of B movie was popular in the ’50s, like those B movie serials were popular in the ’40s?A’ nd use that as the overall uber-genre. We wouldn’t do it as a Saturday-matinee serial. We’d do it as a B movie from the ’50s,” he once said to Entertainment Weekly.
