If struggling Disney had any hopes of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny breaking even at the box office, those hopes were dashed this weekend, as the fifth and final Harrison Ford swashbuckler fell to second place in the U.S. and Canada after just one week.
According to Variety, Patrick Wilson’s fifth installment in the Insidious series knocked Indiana Jones off the top spot with a $32.6 million debut on 3,188 screens. Dial of Destiny earned just $26.5 million on 4,600 screens.
Do the math: Indy earned about $5,760 per screen while Insidious: The Red Door did nearly double that at $10,226.
That’s a lot of empty seats for an Indiana Jones movie in its second week in theaters.
Indy cost $300 million to produce, not including an additional $150 million in marketing expenses, and it isn’t likely to break even, even after video sales. Disney won’t be able to recoup any costs on streaming sales, either, since their own properties stream exclusively on the studio’s multi-billion-dollar-losing Disney+ streamer. Dial of Destiny had been expected to lose somewhere between $200-$250 million before its massive, second-week 56% box office decline. In contrast, last year’s Top Gun: Maverick mega-hit fell off just 33% in its second week.
Even worse for Indy’s box office prospects: Tom Cruise’s second-to-last Mission: Impossible comes out next week, and the hype indicates that it’s going to be this year’s Maverick.
In further contrast, The Red Door cost just $16 million to produce and marketing seems to have been largely word-of-mouth. I mean, I love a good supernatural horror movie, and yet I had no idea there was a fifth Insidious movie or that it was already in theaters.
Here’s the real mystery behind The Dial of Destiny:
Critics and audiences both seem to love Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, so why did it lose out in its second week to a much less-well received, low-budget horror sequel?
I have a hypothesis: The audience for Dial of Destiny is not the core Indiana Jones audience.
The timeless charm of the first three Indiana Jones movies is simple to define. Indy was no Superman. He had the physical limits of an ordinary man, even if his odds of escaping each incredible action sequence were always on the high side. Heh. But Indy made mistakes, he got hurt, and each victory looked and felt to audiences like real efforts on his part. The movies themselves were shot on comparatively low budgets. Filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas relied on character, story, and low-tech filmmaking techniques to generate genuine thrills.
People who liked that Indiana Jones do not like this Indiana Jones: CGI’d to death in a $300 million spectacle that includes 80-year-old Harrison Ford outracing a subway train on horseback. That’s the same actor who later in the movie gets knocked out — apparently for at least a couple of days — by a single punch delivered by a slender woman of no apparent athletic ability.
Audiences who are used to character- and consequence-free CGI spectacles don’t seem to mind that The Dial of Destiny isn’t really an Indiana Jones movie. They’re there for some thrills, which apparently the movie delivers enough of to get 88% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. But having shown up to see Indy in its opening week, they’re off to see this week’s new shiny object. Blockbusters are built on repeat ticket sales by people who can’t get enough. Very little Dial of Destiny is apparently more than enough.
Viewers like you and me — who loved the original trilogy precisely because those films relied on character, story, and low-tech filmmaking techniques — couldn’t even be bothered to show up for the opening week of this consequence-free CGI spectacle. The viewers who would bring down that 88% Rotten Tomatoes score didn’t and won’t watch it.
Judging by Dial’s massive second-week falloff, there are a lot more of us than there are of them. So, really, there’s no higher praise I can offer modern movie audiences than this: You’ve proven that not even Disney, with all of its money and technical wizardry, can make audiences love a faux Indiana Jones.
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