Harrison Ford: Indiana Jones 5 will mark the final time the character appears on film

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the fifth Indiana Jones movie, with the first coming out all the way back in 1981, when star Harrison Ford was 39 years old. He’s 80 now, so this final film has been a long time coming. “I had been ambitious to do this film for 10 years, and there finally came a time when we all committed to that,” he told Total Film. “It was a joyous moment for me. I think it’s a rare situation that I find myself in.”

And in case you’re wondering, this is indeed the final Indiana Jones film, at least if Ford has anything to say about it. “This is the final film in the series, and this is the last time I’ll play the character,” he said. “I anticipate that it will be the last time that he appears in a film.”

He maintains that this is the case even though he knows that Disney is working on an Indiana Jones TV show, saying that he will “not be involved in that, if it does come to fruition.”

The first 25 minutes of Indiana Jones 5 feature a young-looking Harrison Ford

Disney loves mining its intellectual property, so it’s hard to know if Ford’s prediction will be borne out. Dial of Destiny does look like an interesting movie, though, in part because the first 25 minutes feature a flashback with a de-aged Harrison Ford looking like he did back in the days of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

“I just shot him, and he just pretended that he was 35,” Mangold told Total Film, calling Ford an “incredibly gifted and agile” actor.

“But the technology involved is a whole other thing. We had hundreds of hours of footage of him in close-ups, in mediums, in wides, in every kind of lighting, night and day. I could shoot Harrison on a Monday as, you know, a 79-year-old playing a 35- year-old, and I could see dailies by Wednesday with his head already replaced.”

"It wasn’t a year of effort to get to a first pass,” Mangold adds. “It was an incredible technology, and, in many ways, I just didn’t think about it. I just focused on shooting what’s [approximately] a 25-minute opening extravaganza that was my chance to just let it rip. The goal was to give the audience a full-bodied taste of what they missed so much. Because then when the movie lands in 1969, they’re going to have to make an adjustment to what it is now, which is different from what it was."

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny comes out in theaters on June 30.

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