10 Dumb Mistakes That Ruined Once Great Franchises

It's pretty cliché to look at the raging disappointment that is Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull and say that the ultimate problem is the fact that this time the mystical force behind Indy's adventure was aliens. But I'm not just talking about the inter-dimensional beings (as they like to be called) being a dumb addition to the canon, nor how the attempts at replicating a fifties sci-fi B-movie fell completely flat. Rather, I'm meaning what they represent in terms of the film's creative process.

George Lucas had been wanting to get a fourth, saucer-inflected movie complete with killer ants and rocket sleds off the ground since the early-nineties, and refused to go anywhere else with Dr. Jones until Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford relented. The end result was an idea forced into existence over such a long period of time that it wound up being a bastardised version of whatever original spark there was. This is really a story of complete pig-headedness, where insistence for one thing hampered the rest of the creativity.

This delay also meant that the film's position in popular culture changed; coming in the noughties, it was in the prime position to revisit elements of the original, which sounds exciting but would up feeling creaky; there's following formula and then there's dragging back Karen Allen for no distinct purpose.