By now you’ve surely heard people talking about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at the box office, so I thought I’d jump into the discourse. What follows are a series of thoughts about it that are somewhat connected and somewhat random, but that I hope are helpful contributions to an online discourse that is, quite frankly, very often idiotic. But I’ll try my best not to fit that bill, though my readers will be the judge of that.
So here we go: seven thoughts about Dial of Destiny and the box office.
1. Yes, Dial of Destiny is a box office disappointment
Let’s get this one out of the way at the start, because I can already see someone writing that, based on my later points, I’m just carrying water for Disney (that’s laughably false). This movie will not break even and is not measuring up to previous entries in the franchise. It’s been a disappointment. However it’s not like this was a sudden surprise, because the movie has pretty much hit the projections for it. The projections for Dial of Destiny had been that it would open to somewhere between 60 and 70 million domestically, and even though it came in on the low end of that estimate, it still basically did as expected.
In other words, this is not the case of a movie doing considerably worse than it was expected to do, at least not in the run-up to the film’s release. We have seen examples of that, but this isn’t one of them. It was always thought that this movie would parallel franchises like James Bond and Mission: Impossible, given that all three franchises draw on an older, male demographic as their largest audience. The latest James Bond movie, No Time to Die (2021), opened to ~56 million domestically. Not including Dead Reckoning since it’s too new to tell the results (though it’s worth noting that it looks to do better than Dial of Destiny without blowing it out of the water), the most recent Mission: Impossible movie, Fallout (2018) opened to ~61 million domestically. Dial of Destiny opened to ~60 million domestically.
All of this is to say that, while Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is in fact a box office disappointment, it is NOT because it fell far short of projections. Actually, it’s pretty much hit those, and has been comparable to the franchises everyone thought it would be comparable with, based on the target demographic it was always likely to engage.
2. The big problem with the movie’s box office was it’s budget
So why, then, is it such a disappointment? Here’s where we come to the real rub: the movie has a budget of $295 million, making it one of the most expensive films ever made (it looks to be 13th all-time, more precisely, coming in just a few million above Dead Reckoning). The reported budget doesn’t include marketing or promotion, which is important to note when considering discussions about a movie breaking even; a film needs to bring in considerably more than the “budget” in order to be a net positive. The movies on the list of most expensive ever made are movies that mostly were huge box office hits, and therefore the spending could be more easily justified because it was a success.
Not so for Dial of Destiny, but then again, it was never expected to be in that range either. What I mean to say is that the movie’s budget set it up to be in a position where a box office success was nearly impossible, because this movie was going to need to be a gigantic hit when nobody expected it would be.
The real issue, then, is on spending. And that’s something that Disney CEO Bob Iger has been quite public about, saying that the company is going to be reigning in spending on their projects, and doing less of them, as they move forward. This applies to Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, and the rest. Lucasfilm and Marvel have certainly been the biggest (regular) offenders when it comes to inflated budgets, and that’s an issue that’s going to need to be addressed in a changing box office landscape. There was a time in the last decade or two that a high budget spectacle showcase was going to be a justifiable draw. But those days are gone. And studios are going to need to adapt to it. This will put more pressure on the storytelling than the spectacle, but that’s honestly a good thing.
3. The coverage of the film’s box office has been baffling
The film media didn’t like Dial of Destiny very much, and that much has been clear ever since it’s debut. This also is not a movie that’s designed to be well-received by the reviewers, but by the fans – meaning this is the kind of movie that generally doesn’t get great critic praise anyway. This all makes Disney’s decision to premiere the movie at Cannes so bizarre, because it led to a long period of time where the media just wrote about how it was disappointing. That was a big misfire for Disney.
But it’s also the case that the coverage of this movie has been less-than-objective. I’m not an anti-media basher (nor do I have any desire to be grouped into that camp), but any basic study of human psychology will tell you that people don’t enter things completely unbiased. I don’t pretend to come into this article unbiased either: I’m a big Indiana Jones fan, I love what Lucasfilm has done in the last decade, and I really liked Dial of Destiny. I’m not unbiased! Nobody is, and that’s my point. And right or wrong, a person’s ideas about a movie will affect how that movie is covered. Which is why the media blitz that happened with the trades all jumping on the box office of Dial of Destiny was predictable, but disappointing.
When compared to coverage of other (similar) movies, the coverage of Dial of Destiny is downright hypocritical. When looking at the box office in perspective, the coverage is downright misleading. And when talking about the box office with such emphasis so as to dominate the discourse, the coverage is downright harmful to the internet discourse among fans. Let’s be clear about this much: at least part of the reason why so many people are concerned about Dial of Destiny being a box office disappointment is because the media focused on it so much, often without context that could have helped.
4. Fans have a much better view of the movie than critics
With all of this in mind, it’s also important to mention that Dial of Destiny has been generally well-received by those fans who watched it. While I hesitate to use these metrics (because we all know how easily manipulated they can be and how easily they can be misleading), this can at least give a general idea: Dial of Destiny has a 68% rating on Rotten Tomatoes amongst critics, but an 88% rating amongst audience-goers.
Amongst fans, that places it firmly in third-place in the franchise, behind The Last Crusade (96%) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (94%) but ahead of Temple of Doom (82%) and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (53%). For it to come in third (which is, coincidentally, where I rank it too), especially behind the two movies it’s behind, is very respectable. And an 88% approval rating is as well. It has been quite clear that the audiences who went to see the movie came away enjoying it quite a bit. Sure it’s not Raiders or Crusade, but that’s an impossible standard to hold any movie to. This is a great Indiana Jones film and a very enjoyable ride, and it seems audiences are finding that out.
5. Dial of Destiny’s box office results would be far more important if it was a start rather than an end
Often, the focus on a movie’s box office results amongst fans is not healthy and quite overemphasized, as it just turns into weapons to wield supporting whatever agenda people want to advocate for or against. I’d dare to guess that a high percentage of the time fans focus on the box office, it’s not for the best reasons. But there are (obviously) some very important reasons to focus on the box office, especially for studios, and one of them is if the movie is intended to be followed up by more.
Let me use an example: a big Marvel movie flopping at the box office right now would be far more concerning than Dial of Destiny flopping, because Marvel is continuing to build toward future films. They need to sustain interest. The same would go for an episodic Star Wars film, for instance, as a disappointment there would lead to questions about the next film(s) to come and fan interest. But this is where Indiana Jones doesn’t have that problem, because this is very much viewed as the ending, not a beginning or block to keep building on. Dial of Destiny is Harrison Ford’s last time playing the character, and John Williams’s last time scoring the character, and (almost certainly) the last time for Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and Kathy Kennedy and Frank Marshall to work with the character. It’s the end of an era.
Because of that, the movie’s box office results should matter less to audiences. Fans aren’t waiting to see how the movie does to find out if the next one will get made, and Disney isn’t waiting with anxious breath to project how the next chapter will fare. This is the conclusion. Now, the box office might quiet some of the speculation about a spin-off show or something, but that was never guaranteed and this was always viewed as an ending.
6. The bigger picture is that the entire movie industry is navigating uncertain waters at the box office
There is important context that must be considered if we’re going to take a fair look at how Dial of Destiny is doing at the box office, and it’s to notice that these questions are not relegated to this one movie, or this one studio, but to the entire industry post-Covid. Just this year, movies like The Little Mermaid, The Flash, Elementals, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts all opened to less-than-stellar debuts (though some have turned it around a bit since). Across the board, these days it seems like big movies are disappointing just as much (if not more so) than they’re hitting.
Movie studios are trying to figure it all out, but one reason that Disney has already been outspoken about is the streaming expectations that have been created. Both Disney CEO Bob Iger and Pixar boss Pete Docter have spoken about how, by putting movies direct to streaming during the pandemic, they trained audiences to expect that. And the impact of streaming services on theatrical box office numbers is something I don’t think we’ve reached the end of by any means. Previously, if you didn’t see a movie in theaters you’d wait 4-6 months for the chance to pay money to watch it from home. Now, if you don’t see it in theaters, it will likely be coming to the streaming platform you already subscribe to in about 2-3 months.
What that has done is increased the middle ground of audience-goers: there are still people who will never watch certain movies, and still die-hard fans who will be in theaters no matter what. But there’s a large segment of people somewhere in the middle, where they might be interested in a movie but not rushing to fill theaters. Those groups have always existed, but that middle group seems to have grown post-pandemic, and that group certainly seems far more inclined to wait until it hits the streaming service. I don’t know what studios can do to fix this. The studios don’t seem to know what to do to fix this. But let’s be abundantly clear on this point: this problem is far, far bigger than Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. And to consider this film’s box office performance without that context is irresponsible.
7. A plea to fans: don’t use the box office to wage war
Lastly, I’ll keep this one short and simple, but it’s a plea to fans and those participating in the internet discourse not to turn this into some great agenda to push your point. We’ve seen plenty of YouTubers railing on this film and using the box office as proof that Lucasfilm is trash, but they don’t actually engage with the movie at all. They spew the same points that they heard from someone else, mindlessly repeat it, and fit it into a larger narrative about how they didn’t like something Star Wars did or something like that. How many of these people even admit that they didn’t view the movie because they knew it was going to be bad, and now the box office proves they were right?
The internet, and social media in particular, have radically changed how people approach watching movies, and not for the better. I’m convinced that in the internet age it would be mostly impossible for an Indiana Jones-type film (same with Star Wars) to receive the kind of widespread love from audiences that these movies did in the 1980s, even if the quality was the same (and with Star Wars, I’m convinced that The Last Jedi is at that level). The internet incentives negativity and division; it’s built in to the very fabric of how social media works.
So what do we do? Well, a place to start would be to stop weaponizing a movie’s box office numbers as if that’s the judge of a film. No, evaluate the film on the merits that movies should be evaluated on, and let the results fall where they may.
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