The Best Indiana Jones Movie That Was Never Made

The worst Indiana Jones sequel may have been the perfect one.

I don’t imply this in a obscure woulda-shoulda-coulda kind of approach. I imply that the worst Indiana Jones, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, developed (or possibly devolved) out of a vastly superior model of the identical idea. This iteration of the fourth Indiana Jones — which options practically all of Crystal Skull’s key characters and settings, together with an an identical MacGuffin — was written a couple of years prior by an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter in shut session with Steven Spielberg. But it was by no means produced.

It would have been titled Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods. It was written by Frank Darabont, the screenwriter and director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, and later the developer and government producer of The Walking Dead TV collection. In his early days in Hollywood, Darabont labored as a author on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, the short-lived tv collection that exposed Indy’s childhood adventures encountering nice figures of historical past.

When Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was made in 1989, the franchise’s key gamers — director Spielberg, producer/author George Lucas, and star Harrison Ford — all assumed it would conclude the collection. But inside a couple of years, all three males had been inundated with requests from followers to make one other film. Throughout the Nineties, when Lucas wasn’t work on Star Wars Special Editions or prequels, he tinkered with concepts for a fourth Indiana Jones, and he introduced in varied co-writers to develop the fabric with him.

READ MORE: Indiana Jones Is a Great Hero Because He Is a Total Failure

Feeling they’d exhausted the Thirties journey serials milieu that had served as the idea for the unique Indiana Jones idea — and recognizing that their main man was getting older — Lucas felt a fourth film wanted to attract inspiration from a brand new supply. So he relocated the collection from the Thirties to the Nineteen Fifties, and determined that simply as the unique Indy trilogy borrowed from Saturday matinee motion footage, this fourth Indiana Jones would steal from the pulp fiction of the Nineteen Fifties: Namely paranoid sci-fi motion pictures about atomic horror and alien menaces. Accordingly, whereas Lucas cycled by way of a number of co-writers on the undertaking, he stored instructing them to return to the identical batch of concepts: Indiana Jones battling Russians and encountering proof of alien life amongst historical civilizations.

Those directions lead, in 1995, to Jeb Stuart’s Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars script, which featured a number of the identical parts that wound up in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — together with Indy surviving a nuclear bomb check by hiding inside a lead-lined fridge — however was far more immediately about Indy combating aliens and alien craft. But then Independence Day opened in theaters, and stole the undertaking’s thunder earlier than it obtained off the bottom. At Spielberg’s behest, Lucas tabled the undertaking for some time.

Enter Darabont, who joined the film within the early 2000s and, in keeping with him, wound up spending a complete 12 months of his life targeted on crafting an Indiana Jones script whereas he “worked very closely with Steven Spielberg.”

“[I] applied all my passion and skill, and gave [Spielberg] a script that he loved,” Darabont later stated.

To learn this script, is to grasp why. (You don’t must be a crusading archaeologist to seek out it; simply Google the title and it comes proper up.) What is fascinating about Darabont’s Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods screenplay is not only how good it’s — and it’s nice – however how significantly better it’s than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (no less than on paper) with an virtually an identical batch of story and thematic parts.

Here are a number of the most attention-grabbing variations between the 2…

Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods is a superb script. So why didn’t Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford make it?

According to Darabont, Spielberg wished to. Years later, Darabont stated Spielberg “was ready to shoot it … it was going to be his next film. He told me it was the best script he’d read since Raiders of the Lost Ark. That’s a quote, and I’ll always treasure it.”

Lucas, nevertheless, had reservations. “George Lucas read it, didn’t like it, and threw ice water on the whole thing,” Darabont recalled. “The project went down in flames. Steven and I looked like accident victims the day we got that call. I certainly don’t blame Steven for it. He wasn’t in a position to overrule George, and wouldn’t have overruled him even if he could. He and George have been close friends for a long time, and they’ve had an agreement for years that no Indiana Jones film will ever get made unless they both completely agreed on the script. It was just such an awful surprise, after all my hopes and effort.”

Darabont additionally stated that the failure of City of the Gods was “emotionally devastating” and referred to as it a “main reason” he stopped doing work-for-hire writing gigs and started to focus fully on initiatives he may management. So not solely did we lose out on a doubtlessly nice Indiana Jones sequel, we additionally missed out on different scripts Darabont might need written afterwards. Instead they continue to be misplaced endlessly, just like the Ark of the Covenant in an monumental Army warehouse crammed with unmarked crates.