Acting for Two: Anthony Ingruber did motion-capture doubling for the younger Indy in several scenes in the 1944 prologue. Ingruber also played a guest at the auction.
Approval of God: Steven Spielberg absolutely adored the film after seeing a first screening of it in May 2023 alongside Bob Iger, and gave full praise to James Mangold for his talent. When the lights came on, Spielberg said to the people next to him: "Damn! I thought I was the only one who knew how to make one of these!"
Awesome, Dear Boy: Ford seems to genuinely love playing Indiana Jones, which is why he was willing to reprise the role despite turning 79 during filming.
Box Office Bomb: Dial earned $174 million domestic and $383 million worldwide and resulted in Disney losing anywhere from $100 million to over $200 million on the film, and may be the biggest box office bomb ever if unadjusted for inflation. Numerous delays and the COVID-19 pandemic caused the budget to bloat to around $300 million before marketing and distribution costs, and it ultimately made less in theaters than his first one did over four decades prior despite costing over 15 times as much to make. Domestically, the film opened with a paltry $60 million and dropped quickly after that, and its $174 million stateside is the lowest for the franchise and far below the previous entries when taking inflation into account. Its failure was generally blamed on mixed-to-average reviews, following up the divisive Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and a lackluster marketing campaign. Deadline opined the film's biggest problem was that it didn't have much appeal to those who weren't already fans of the franchise, and Disney didn't make much of an effort to give the film four-quadrant appeal the same way Paramount did with Top Gun: Maverick the previous year, and attendance was anemic from the under-35 demographic. The release of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and the expansions of surprise hit Sound of Freedom the next weekend did even more damage.
B-Team Sequel: Indiana's last cinematic adventure is also his first without Steven Spielberg as the director and George Lucas as the writer (and without sound designer Ben Burtt and editor Michael Kahn), with James Mangold taking over directing and scriptwriting duties. However, Spielberg and Lucas served as creative consults to Mangold, and were executive producers. As of this film, all three of the major franchises Spielberg launched have passed into the hands of other directors, with Spielberg sticking with Indy for a total of four films, compared to the one film he did for Jaws and the two he did for Jurassic Park.
Channel Hop: Distribution of the Indiana Jones franchise went from Paramount to Disney with the latter's purchase of Lucasfilm in 2012, which granted them the rights to the IP (albeit not distribution of the other four films, which remain at Paramount as of 2023note Part of the deal makes all the films available to stream on Disney+). However, Paramount continues to be credited on posters and its studio ident runs alongside Disney and Lucasfilm's before the movie. As a result, this is the first film that Paramount and Disney have collaborated since Popeye and Dragonslayer.
Creator Backlash: While Karen Allen was very happy to return as Marion Ravenwood, she said she would have liked a larger role within the actual plot of the film.
Development Gag: A popularly derided part of Frank Darabont's unproduced script for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (named Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods) was that Indy used the sentence "Welcome to Earth" before shooting an alien. In Dial of Destiny, the sentence "Welcome back to Earth" is part of the astronauts' ticket parade.
In the Latin American Spanish dub, Carlos Segundo voices Indy, since Harrison Ford's usual voice actor José Lavat (and who dubbed Indy in Temple of Doom and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) died in 2018.
Féodor Atkine voices Sallah in European French, since both of the previous ones, Albert de Médina (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Jacques Frantz (The Last Crusade) have passed away (in 2009 and 2021, respectively).
Posthumous Credit: Camera technician Nic Cupac died on November 4, 2021, while filming Dial of Destiny in Morocco. The work was eventually released less than two years after his death.
Production Posse: Director James Mangold brought on his favoured cinematographer Phedon Papamichael to shoot the film, and the script was co-written by brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, with whom Mangold had previously worked with on Ford v Ferrari. There's also Boyd Holbrook, previously in Logan.
Real-Life Relative: Besides being an additional voice for the Latin American Spanish dub, all of José Luis Orozco's children are involved in that dub. Luis Fernando Orozco voiced Klaber, Andrea Orozco voiced Agent Mason, and Alejandro Orozco was one of the ADR directors.
After Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Steven Spielberg believed that he would be relegated to producer of any future Indiana Jones films after "maturing as a filmmaker" with the original trilogy. He ultimately directed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and was open to direct another sequel, but ultimately, he stepped down from directing the fifth film and chose to executive produce it.
Frank Darabont proposed that former Nazis serve as the villains for the fourth film, but this was vetoed by Spielberg. They are back in the fifth, which includes neither creator.
Prior to the release of the fourth film, media published that footage had been shot in Morocco and that it would be one of the locations in the story. It didn't come to pass and may have been an intentional misdirection, but this film features Tangier as the setting of a chase scene.
In a more abstract sense, the film subverts the blueprint of preceding installments by killing the main villain in a vehicle accident and allowing Indy to finally keep one of the ancient magical artifacts he comes across. However, both had already happened in the unproduced script Indiana Jones and the Monkey King, written by Chris Columbus in The '80s (the main villain is killed when his giant tank is run off a cliff, and Indy is gifted the Monkey King's golden rod at the story's conclusion.).
Indy fighting Nazi holdouts and going after the Lance of Longinus had been considered as different possible sequels to Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (which itself features Nazis going after a machine made in Ancient Greece). The Lance had previously been the focus of the 1995 comic Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny, and was also referenced in Lawrence Kasdan's original draft of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Harrison Ford, Karen Allen and John Rhys-Davies return to their respective roles of the titular character, Marion Ravenwood and Sallah Mohammed Faisel el-Kahir in this final Indiana Jones installment. Ford and Allen had last played their characters in 2008, whereas Davies returns to the franchise for the first time since 1989.
In the Japanese dub, Kunio Murai, who previously voiced Indy in the first home media release of the first three films, as well as the Nippon TV dubs of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, reprises the role once again.
In the Latin American Spanish dub, Rubén Moya and Anabel Méndez reprises their role as Sallah and Marion Ravenwood, respectively. For Moya, it would be the final time he played Sallah before his 2023 death.
Saved from Development Hell: George Lucas wanted to produce a fifth film as far back as 2008 after the release of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. He had some Creative Differences with Steven Spielberg, and nothing moved forward. Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, Kathleen Kennedy confirmed that the new film would happen, and Disney formally announced the project for a 2019 release in 2016. Further delays due to script issues (which led David Koepp, Jon Kasdan and Dan Fogelman to leave the project) and the COVID-19 Pandemic pushed its filming forward, with the film being released in 2023.
Sequel Gap: It was released 15 years after the previous installment.
Troubled Production: Filming was delayed for over a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Then Harrison Ford suffered a shoulder injury while rehearsing a fight scene, delaying the shooting for a few weeks.
Steven Spielberg was originally set to direct the movie, but ultimately chose not to in order to focus on other projects and James Mangold was hired to replace him. He remained aboard as an executive producer alongside George Lucas.
George Lucas was originally working on a fifth Indiana Jones movie around the late 2000s and early 2010s, with Frank Marshall saying that Lucas already had a MacGuffin in mind. However, Lucas semi-retiring after selling Lucasfilm to Disney and the many reports of this film's plot being conceived entirely by Mangold imply that whatever story Lucas came up with, it was eventually discarded on the way.
At one point, back when Lucas was still in charge of Lucasfilm, a spin-off film with Shia LaBeouf as Mutt Williams as the protagonist was considered, with Ford playing Indiana Jones in a similar role to that his father Henry Jones Sr. had in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with LaBeouf still hinting at his possible involvement back in 2011. However, inbetween Mutt's status as The Scrappy and LaBeouf's controversies, which destroyed his relationship with Lucasfilm (and by extension Disney when they acquired the franchise with the purchase of Lucasfilm a year later), persuaded Lucas to change his mind.
A potential plot for the movie that was discussed a long time ago was trying to locate and rediscover Atlantis.
There'd been talk back as far as Crystal Skull about convincing Sean Connery to come back for the fifth one and that the mention of Henry dying in the fourth one would come with the revelation in the next film that he was Faking the Dead, but 90-year-old Connery's passing in 2020 made any chance of that happening disappear completely though.
Frank Marshall initially said that the film was going to be an Immediate Sequel picking up from the last film's ending, hinting that the film would have started during the reception of Indy and Marion's wedding. Presumably due to the last film's less than favorable reception, the idea was dropped over development.
Back in 2012, Spielberg denied any chance to digitally de-ageHarrison Ford for the film, insisting that Ford had to play the part no matter his age. The official trailer's shots of a de-aged Indiana Jones pretty much confirm Mangold didn't think the same or that Spielberg changed his mind (though admittedly the de-aged scenes are limited to flashbacks).
David Koepp was originally set to write the movie after writing many of Steven Spielberg's films, including the film's predecessor Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. He eventually left the project to direct You Should Have Left, being replaced by Jon Kasdan and Dan Fogelman for a while before coming back with a new idea until Spielberg left the project. After Mangold's hiring, Koepp opted to depart the film due to not wishing to "bother" Mangold with suggestions of what Spielberg would have done as the director.
After Koepp's departure from the project, as stated above, Jon Kasdan (son of Raiders of the Lost Ark writer Lawrence Kasdan) and This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman were at one point hired to pitch new versions for the film's story. In the former's case, Kasdan was actually asked to assemble a writers room to do so. However, they all dropped from the project before Koepp's brief rehiring until Koepp left the project for good with Spielberg's exit.
Jim Broadbent expressed interest in returning as Charles Stanforth.
Several actors unrelated to the franchise, but with creative ties to the franchise's filmmakers and actors, such as Liam Neeson, Mark Hamill and Ryan Gosling all expressed interest in appearing in the film. Hamill particularly was interested in playing a villain.
With his initial retirement announcement, this was originally going to be the final score ever composed by John Williams (and his final collaboration with Spielberg or at least on a Spielberg-produced project). However, Williams changed his mind and announced that he would not retire after all (although this is his final Indiana Jones score for the franchise).
The original script apparently had a lot of jokes regarding Indy's advanced age, but Harrison Ford objected to them, as he felt that they were distracting from the audience experiencing the story.
Mangold was toying with an ending where Voller's scheme to go back to 1939 succeeded and Indy was left in the unenviable position of trying to save Hitler from him. He decided against it, as he thought Indy meeting Archimedes had a greater emotional impact.
Nine days prior to the release of Dial of Destiny, Kathleen Kennedycommented that a Helena Shaw movie could be "entirely possible" in the future, though she noted that at that point, there were no conversations for such spin-off, with the focus being on wrapping up Ford's tenure as Indiana Jones.
to over $200 million