I always get excited about new Indiana Jones movies, and I know enough about this upcoming one, the fifth movie in the series over a 40-year period of time, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, to say I think it’s going to be a pretty good movie, and that I’ll like it. Whenever I go to a bookstore, I see Indiana Jones’s impact on publishing. Most of the top ten books sold in publishing have some kind of Indiana Jones influence. That character was a wonderful creation of George Lucas, a guy who wanted to be either a drag racer or an anthropologist; instead, he became a filmmaker. And what he did was much better for many industries, especially history; he made it fun through the character of Indiana Jones. I see Indiana Jones all over each copy I receive of Biblical Archaeology Review, which I have been getting for over 40 years now. It’s undoubtedly my favorite topic. Because of my very popular blog that, I operate like a newspaper, many people think I am obsessed with politics. And I am very interested in politics. But mythology, comparative religion, and history, in general, are what I put most of my efforts into. I spend about 70 hours a week professionally. I spend about 30 hours a week on political “things.” And the rest of the time, I spend reading, exploring, and contemplating. It is not uncommon, as many people with hostile intent have learned, that I am up often at 2 AM walking around my yard or going up and down my street thinking about things I have read. I don’t sleep much because I love history topics so intensely, and I am always in some sort of study of those topics. Indiana Jones made history as an industry that made normally boring topics, fun, and I think this new film will do much as the previous films have done for the study of history, bring joy and adventure to it, and the human consciousness will grow in healthy ways. 

And because I’m interested in this subject, I watched the coverage of the Cannes Film Festival, which played in the middle part of May in France, where Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was shown to a large audience. The Disney people, especially Bob Iger, the CEO, think they have a good movie in the new Indiana Jones film, and they decided to rush it out to reviewers to get some positive buzz going on the film. And they need it; as I have been talking about, Disney is in big trouble on multiple fronts. They have invested too much in ESG scores, BlackRock political values, and their company’s commitments have been slowly destroying them. They are not the same company they were ten years ago, and ten years from now, I think we will perhaps not see them in entertainment as an influencer at all. It is that bad for Disney. And I’m not a fan of Bob Iger, a big-time liberal who has committed to the global citizen movement, gambling that globalism would be the new transition economic force, so he has steered his company in that direction. But globalism is failing across the world. People want American nationalism, and even in broken-up countries on the other side of the globe, people want to think about the idea of America, not a bunch of bureaucrats in the European Union who the Administrative State so paralyzes they can’t even tie their shoes or a China approach with centrally managed communism that completely steamrolls the individuals of society into mashed potatoes who serve corrupt oligarchs like some top-heavy aristocracy. 

But I don’t think Bob Iger is an idiot. I think he did a pretty good job as the Disney CEO over the previous decade. However, it was a house of cards that was eventually going to fall, so I think it was a horrendous idea for him to return to attempt to save Disney because he was just going to sink himself in the process. He knows he needed a hit with Indiana Jones, so he stepped in and encouraged the filmmakers to make a film that people would want to see, to take out some of the Kathy Kennedy from Lucasfilm’s wokeness that was showing itself to be very unpopular with Bud Light, Target, and essentially the rise of the MAGA movement in politics. Bob and the gang made a pretty good movie that they thought would serve fans enough and not compromise their commitment to ESG measures, and they were in a rush to show it to the public. And, of course, the results were devastating. It was the worst thing they could have done. It would have been better in this media climate to surprise everyone at the release date instead of trying to create positive buzz for the film a month early. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny comes out on June 30^th, so that’s a lot of time to have people who now hate Disney because of its commitment to woke policies to criticize everything that they do, from The Little Mermaid to the destruction of Pixar, the ruin of Star Wars, and now another Indiana Jones film that many of the critics who saw the film are saying is worse than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. 

I personally liked Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It injected into publishing hundreds and hundreds of interesting books that I spent many thousands of hours reading over the last decade, so I was very happy with it. And I think that will certainly happen with this new movie, The Dial of Destiny, with the plot point being that of the Greek mathematician Archimedes. I think the concept for this film is much more interesting than a time travel movie like Back to the Future. This one deals with quantum entanglement, which people know is something I spend a lot of time considering and the nature of dimensional reality outside our four dimensions. But Disney underestimated the negative power of new media, so once their critics like Variety and the BBC came out negatively against the new Indiana Jones film, the new media types on YouTube, who have become the new influencers, pounced. It didn’t matter how good or bad the new Indiana Jones film was because it’s a Disney project, and as a company that has been committed to woke policies, they have made themselves open season for intense criticism, which will impact the opening of the new film. Iger should have held his cards and just let the film tell its own story when it was released. I’m sure I’ll find things I like about the new film, and I’m sure that the wokeisms will be there and I won’t like those. But I do think that Disney realized that Indiana Jones required some fan service and that they attempted to give that to this new film as a peace offering to their audiences. But it has had the opposite effect, and in some ways, I feel sorry for everyone involved in the film. They are feeling the pain of using their movies to sell political messages that the world doesn’t want. And when they thought they had surrendered to the fans a bit, they have only been slapped harder, which is the story coming out of the Cannes Film Festival. No matter how good the movie is, because of any connection to woke Disney, people are going to hate it because that is the political climate we are all in now. Globalism is the enemy; people know it and express themselves accordingly. 

Rich Hoffman