Director James Mangold (Logan) has big expectations and shoes to fill with the upcoming Indiana Jones 5. His only saving grace is that The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was not that great. Mangold says that to move a franchise forward you need to find its heart.
During a recent “Quarantine Watch Party” of Logan, Mangold discusses his approach with all franchises, but more-importantly Indiana Jones 5:
But like in all my work, I’m always trying to find an emotional center to operate from. I think the most important thing is, in an age when franchises have become a commodity, that serving the same thing again.
At least for me, in the dances I’ve had with any franchises, serving the same thing again, the same way, usually just produces a longing for the first time you ate it.
Meaning, it makes an audience wish that they just had the first one over again.
So you have to push something to someplace new, while also remembering the core reasons why everyone was gathered.
And to use Logan as an example of that, when you’re dealing in a world of a very pressured franchise — for all of the things, and there were many that I freed myself from in the canon, in the baggage, to try and make the best story— the core values of Logan, of Wolverine, and Charles Xavier and the X-Men, were something that I felt we never abandoned.
The core ideas of their honor, their sense of duty, and the uniqueness of this particular set of characters that they were outcasts, oddities. Beings that had no home in this world, and yet we’re trying to do good. Were trying to do something right and find their way.
Those core issues were at the heart of the movie. And in any franchise I take in, I’d always be trying to capture and make sure that we preserve those core ideas that are at the center, because that’s why these stories are more than franchises.
They’re the fairy tales of our contemporary culture.
It will be interesting where Mangold takes the franchise. There’s a world of mysterious artifact still to mine, so anything’s game. If you take Mangold’s Logan as an example, maybe Mangold’s here to retire the character with style.
