Reject Report: The Return of Indiana Jones

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on May 22, 2008

Happy Memorial Day weekend, my fellow Americans! (Why am I saying that? I’m Canadian! And I don’t get a holiday on Monday, either.) Welcome to our Reject Report preview of the Memorial Day weekend. The focus for this five-day weekend coming up is on one movie and one movie only: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. We all know it will win the box office. But by how much, and will any records be set? Good questions, to which we should have the answers relatively quickly after the movie rolls out in 4,260 theaters from coast to coast on a rare Thursday opening night.

I can go on and on with my usual comments about how easy it is to pick a movie to finish in first place when it is the only new release going wide. It’s true, there’s nothing else new out there, again, unless you count these movies that are only rolling out on one or two screens each. So for that reason, this will not be all that long a predictions post. Besides which, I am getting bored with my own predictions, based as they are on all these tracking rumors I keep hearing and reading about in the press. Suffice it to say that the tracking for this one is really good. But more on that later.

On to Indiana Jones 4.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the much-anticipated fourth installment of the Eighties adventure flicks produced by George Lucas and directed by Steven Spielberg. It features Harrison Ford as Dr. Indiana Jones, along with Shia LeBeouf, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen and Ray Winstone, among others. This flick starts out with Indiana Jones battling Soviet agents in the southwest. Jones teams up with LeBeouf’s character Matt Williams to try and find the Crystal Skull of Akator and return it to the temple of the City of Gold, and whoever returns it becomes master of the Skull’s powers. They end up fighting off the Soviets to get the Skull, and they wind up in Peru where they take on the Russians and evil Irina Spalko (Blanchett).

Sounds like fun, eh? The movie has already made its bow at the Cannes Film Festival, and while some of these critics were their usual uptight selves, the fact of the matter is that this flick was not laughed off the movie screen the way Da Vinci Code was run out of town two years ago. I notice Roger Ebert gave the flick a positive review. Heck, our own Kevin Carr gave it an A+. Anyway, the tracking for the five-day weekend for Indiana Jones 4 had been running in the $160-$175 range, and I tend to think the final total for the five days will have to be somewhere in the middle. I just don’t see how it will get to $175 million because that would require something like $35 million a day for five days, and I just don’t see that. But I do see this movie doing close to that kind of business, so I will predict a five-day haul of $166 million.

And here is how I see these next five days shaping up:

So there it is, and we’ll see how it all finishes up by Monday. And keep it right here at Film School Rejects for all the latest Indiana Jones coverage all this week! That’s all for now.

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