Earlier this year, Harrison Ford blew the dust off of his Indiana Jones fedora to play the famed archaeologist one last time in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Director James Mangold slid into the director’s chair in place of Steven Spielberg, and sent Indy on a mission to assemble two halves of Archimedes’ dial, an instrument that can detect fissures in space-time and allow a person to travel through time. As part of the movie, which is available to watch right now with a Disney+ subscription, Indiana Jones (Ford) successfully passes through a fissure and ends up at the Siege in Syracuse in ancient Italy, circa 212 BC. It was, as we mentioned at the time, a huge swing. But I actually thought the movie was going to go one step further.
As the story plays out, Indy and his niece Helena (Phoebe Waller Bridge) vanquish the latest Nazi villain and get to meet Archimedes face to face. And Jones, in the moment, tells Helena he wants to stay. He’s living in the history he has studied his entire life. He doesn’t want to go back. Helena forces him to return to New York in the 1960s, however… an ending that didn’t sit so well with me. So during an exclusive conversation with James Mangold for the movie’s 4K and Blu-ray home video release, I asked him if there were any serious conversations about letting Indy stay in the past. And Mangold told CinemaBlend:
