10 Terrible Movies That Should Have Stayed In Development Hell

2. Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

Will Smith Gemini Man
Paramount Pictures

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull suffers from many of the same problems that blighted John McClane's return to our screens in Live Free or Die Hard the previous year. When viewed outside of the bubble of their respective franchise, they aren't flat-out awful movies, but they pale massively in comparison to their much more illustrious predecessors.

It took 19 years for cinema's most high-profile bearded best friends to come up with CGI gophers, fridge-nuking, Shia LaBeouf doing his best Tarzan impression and poorly-rendered extraterrestrials, which makes you wonder what sort of terrible ideas they'd come up with that had been deemed as not enough over the intervening decades.

Jeb Stuart, Jeffrey Boam, M. Night Shyamalan, Stephen Gaghan, Tom Stoppard, Frank Darabont and Jeff Nathanson all had a shot at trying to crack the story, before Steven Spielberg and George Lucas settled on David Koepp's script, with some input from Lawrence Kasdan.

The fourth Indiana Jones movie went through so many drafts that featured so many combinations of concepts, villains and MacGuffins, yet they ultimately ended up going with the very same idea that Lucas had conceived in the early 90s, making everything that happened in the interim a waste of time.

Reception to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hasn't softened over time, and the general consensus remains that Indiana Jones should have been allowed to ride off into the sunset as he quite literally did at the end of The Last Crusade.

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