Coming Soon X 2
Can’t get enough of Indiana Jones? Well, I have good news, straight from France’s Le Figaro: Indiana Jones Nr. 5 Is On Its Way! “George Lucas confirms that another installment of the saga of the celebrated archeologist is going to be worked on,” the newspaper’s Olivier Delcroix reports. And indeed why not, as Delcroix goes on to report that the previous entry in this series, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” has earned $750 million so far since its release in May.
Still, keep in mind that things are still at the rather vague stage. This news ultimately comes from remarks Lucas made to the London Sunday Times, in an interview to be published tomorrow, in which he states “If Steven [Spielberg] and I find a good idea that we love, we will do another.”
Now, one consideration that Delcroix raises is that, at the end of “Crystal Skull,” Indiana apparently passed on the torch, in the form of his damp fedora, to his sidekick Mutt Williams (I don’t know myself, haven’t seen any of these movies), a gesture that usually is connected with the “torch-passer-on” withdrawing himself from the game. So how can any new movie continue to involve Indiana Jones/Harrison Ford? Ah, you “Star Wars” fans out there already know the answer: you can make new movies depicting what happened already in the past, rather than continuing the story further into the future. Lucas addresses this point directly in the interview. Spielberg would prefer making the next film to fill in an episode in Indiana Jones’ past, while Lucas wants to go ahead and use it to address the challenge of pushing the story ahead into its future.
Anyway, the bottom line is that it is clear there will be a fifth chapter – assuming that Lucas, Spielberg, Ford, and possibly Shia LeBoeuf all remain among the living/unincarcerated.
More Harry Potter, Too!
And secondly: the Czech daily Právo gives us notice that J.K. Rowling, authoress of the wildly popular series of “Harry Potter” books, will release yet another in that series in December, entitled The Tales of Beedle the Bard. OK, I admit that a simple search on Google News would bring you to this Times Online article in English that is vastly more informative on the subject. (Plus, it mentions that The Tales of Beedle the Bard is a “prequel” to Harry Potter, thereby demonstrating my point that any new installment in a tale’s series can be about the past.) But it’s entertaining in the Právo article to see how in Czech they call her “Joanne K. Rowlingová” and her new book Bajky barda Beedla – say that three times fast!
