When Disney dropped a cool $4 billion to acquire Lucasfilm, most of the focus was on how the Magic Kingdom would rescue the Star Wars franchise from being remembered as “those shitty Jar-Jar Binks movies.” It’s a little surprising, given how tepid the Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull turned out, that there hasn’t been much said about reinvigorating Indiana Jones, aside from vague lip service about getting around to it eventually, and agreeing with the internet’s best Photoshop artists that Chris Pratt would be as good as anyone to don the fedora.
While nobody really wants to commit to making a sequel to Crystal Skull (or admit to making it), /Film reports that producer Frank Marshall is decisively ruling out Chris Pratt, and even non-Pratt actors, from taking over the role of Indy from Harrison Ford. “There’s a bunch of people who could probably take the baton,” Marshall said. “[But we are] not doing the Bond thing where we’re going to call somebody else Indiana Jones…we have to figure this out.”
Despite Ford hinting at a fairly awesome performance in The Force Awakens, figuring out how to encase Dr. Jones in franchise carbonite is a problem that needs to be addressed. By now, Steven Spielberg must understand entrusting Shia “Mutt Jones” LeBeouf with the series sounds as wretched as Crystal Skull’s plot synopsis. That leaves casting someone new as Indy’s son (by which we mean Chris Pratt), digitally rendering Harrison Ford, legally changing Chris Pratt’s name to Harrison Ford, or expanding “Indiana Jones” into a title denoting any graduate of the Indiana Jones School Of Rare Antiquities. That last option opens the door for a reboot of an all-female cast of Indiana Joneses that the internet could childishly fight over. Despite those options, Ford, Marshall, and even Spielberg will eventually get too old to make movies about funny little men looking for their mummies, and Disney will probably just go ahead and cast Pratt anyway.