Shia LaBeouf spoke to MTV News at the MTV Movie Awards at the weekend, and he told them that the next Indiana Jones film isn’t that far off.
Talk about a sequel to the last film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, has been circulating ever since the fourth film was released back in 2008, and George Lucas is currently in the process of figuring out the sequel’s story.
According to LaBeouf, he’s been talking to Harrison Ford, who’s played the iconic character since the first film in 1981, and whilst he’s not heard anything concrete, Ford is keeping fit in preparation for what’s to come:
“I talked to Harrison [Ford], he said he’s staying in the gym. He said he’s heard no word, but he does know George [Lucas] is out there looking for a MacGuffin. But he said to me he’s staying in the gym, so that means it’s not so far off.”
The fourth film of course introduced LaBeouf as Ford’s son in the series, with Karen Allen returning as Indy’s old love, Marion Ravenwood, mother of LaBeouf’s character, Mutt Williams. Speculation over the past few years has been surrounding the possibility of LaBeouf taking over the franchise from Ford, but back in 2008, Lucas spoke to MTV and said,
“Indiana Jones is Indiana Jones. Harrison Ford IS Indiana Jones. If it was Mutt Williams it would be ‘Mutt Williams and the Search for Elvis’ or something.”
So fans of the franchise can all sleep happy, knowing that, if things are as they were three years ago, the fifth film would still have at its centre Harrison Ford. In the same interview, Lucas also said,
“We ARE looking for something for him to go after. They are very hard to find. It’s like archeology. It takes a huge amount of research to come up with something that will fit.”
Whatever that something is, it sounds like it’s still being looked for. When LaBeouf mentioned the MacGuffin Lucas is searching for, that’s what he was referring to, the thing that will drive the plot in the fifth film. So whilst the story may not be fully fleshed out yet, we can hope that it’s well on its way, and that Lucas will be presenting a finished story to director Steven Spielberg and Ford before too long.
The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull grossed over $780m. when it came out in 2008, and whilst some might chalk that up just to it being the fourth film in the massively popular series, it clearly shows that the interest in Indiana Jones is still very much alive, and hopefully we won’t have to wait long before we see Indy returning to the big screen again.
