Wow, that's SOME response from Mangold, so forthright! I think his responses should be on the thread for posterity.
1. “There’s nothing I can do about how much a movie is going to make worldwide in a window of four weeks... other than [interviews] like this ... Our grosses were very much in keeping with other films of similar ilk this last summer and none of them featured a hero who was both Harrison’s age and also was a franchise that had been dormant for 20 years.”
--This was the point many of us made regarding the film. It was a very tough landscape for this aged property to succeed in.
2. Mangold recalled, and maybe pined for, the days of Starlog and Cinefantastique, when film reporting “was about what people liked and didn’t like and what inspired them.” However, he admitted, “At some point, everything became the Wall Street Journal.” Now box office numbers are treated as the end-all be-all of a film’s success when history has made it very clear that is not always the case.
--A brilliant take, and sadly the way of the film world these days thanks to Marvel, ironically.
3. “A lot of what expectations are based on is also what movies cost,” he said. “And I think it’s not just true of our film, but others. We made these films during a time of covid. In the case of Indy, they had already been prepping a different movie and had spent a lot of money before we even started. And so it’s just hard to make large-scale movies when world travel was decreased and you could be shut down at any moment by one person in your crew testing positive. And I thought it was heroic of all the studios to keep pushing on and making these pictures despite that, even though they were all costing 20 or 30% more than they would have if they had been made at another time.” This, of course, is rarely mentioned when lamenting the box office grosses of films today but Mangold understands. “Because it hurts the story,” he said. “Why get involved in those nuances?”
--Again, we all know COVID inflated these costs quite a bit. Let's say this film was closer to the 30% mark, then might the non-pandemic budget have been closer to $200 million? That's more in line with what many argued the film should have cost. is it not?
--The second point is NEW, that the studio was "prepping a different movie," which I infer was the Spielberg-led Koepp script? I didn't realize how far they may have been along on that one, but I suppose whatever work had been done would have further ballooned the eventually budget.
