ResidentAlien said:
Surprised? I don't think any of us are surprised at this point. But disappointed? Absolutely. Seems like they're taking the Last Crusade route all over again... Originality, dammit, not rehash.
In this era of bad movies, this is unfortunately what I've expected all along. It's most likely that this is just going to be a very forgettable blockbuster and that even most of the broad fanbase is only going to see it just once. That's what the movie industry has become all about: A mass marketing industry to insure instant profit to redeem the initial investment.
Story and entertainment value are only important to studios in so far as they help to increase profit, which they of course do. The problem is that the best stories involve a significant amount of innovation and original thinking to make them really stand out. You need to be creative, and that's risky business, since sifting through all the new and untested ideas by trial and error, discarding those that don't work by merit to eventually be left with good ones, is a process that inherently involves a significant amount of failure.
This in turn, is why you don't see much creativity in the contemporary movie industy. The stories tend to follow a tried and tested template that works well enough to sell the required amount of tickets. This is not to say that there is no creativity in the movie industry anymore at all, because there is. To sustain the interest of the audiences over a longer period of time, there has to be some sort of renewal of the marketed product. But the process by which this happens today is exceedingly slow and extremely incremental, so as to make sure that no one investment is too risky. As a result, you can watch a couple of movies every year and still be more or less up to date on the developments of the art in the business.
I'm sure Indy 4 is going to reap a healthy profit, but I don't really expect it to entertain me as much I'd like. Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule though. Indy 4 might just be one of those exceptions and turn out to be the manna from heaven we're all wishing for, but I'm not holding my breath.