8 Things That Almost Happened In Indiana Jones Movies

Indiana Jones has battled Nazis, discovered the Ark of the Covenant, drank from the Holy Grail and survived a nuclear explosion by crawling into a lead-lined fridge, but there are some things he didn't get to do during his heyday.

Although the whip-cracking hero has been on grand adventures, some of the most intriguing concepts Steven Spielberg had lined up for him never came to fruition.

From Raiders of the Lost Ark, to the disappointing Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, every Indy movie went through various formats before taking shape, and ideas that would have completely transformed them fell by the wayside.

Most fans will agree that anything would have been better than the alien-invading, CGI monkey-infested travesty that was Crystal Skull, but in some cases, the rejected ideas ended up in the recycle bin for good reasons.

That said, there's some gold in there too, so perhaps Spielberg and his creative team will resurrect some of these shelved concepts when it comes to bringing Indy back for his fifth big-screen outing in the summer of 2020.

After Raiders of the Lost Ark proved a box office smash, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas came up with a dozen different ideas for a sequel and they varied between intriguing and mental. This one just so happens to be both.

Spielberg sparked dino mania when he made Jurassic Park in '93, but this Indy sequel might have done that many years earlier had it gotten the nod over Temple of Doom.

According to John Baxter's 1999 book Mythmaker: The Life and Work of George Lucas, the Star Wars mastermind originally pitched an idea that involved sending Doctor Jones to a lost world inhabited by prehistoric beasts.

The story would have started out in China and featured a set piece where Indy is involved in a motorcycle chase along the country's Great Wall, and somewhere down the line he discovered a lost valley full of dinosaurs.

This would have sounded too outlandish for Indiana Jones at one point, but those aliens and that nuke-proof fridge in Crystal Skull makes it seem almost plausible.

Spielberg proved himself to be the dino master when he adapted Jurassic Park, so there's no reason to believe this movie would have been anything less than a special effects extravaganza, although stop-motion would likely have been used over CGI, given that computer graphics weren't quite as advanced back then.

So, is this an idea he should resurrect for Indiana Jones 5? Considering we've had much worse, there's no reason why not.