When Indiana Jones 5 was shooting a couple of years ago, fans were anticipating what the “and” part of the title would be this time around.
Eventually, the full name of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was unveiled, emphasising Archimedes’ time-travelling Antikythera device.
Yet originally the movie’s title was going to be named after a Beatles album from the Sixties setting of this adventure.
After the World War II opening scene, fans will remember the 1969 segment opened with Indy being woken up by hippies playing music in the apartment next to his.
The counterculture youths were playing The Beatles’ 1967 album Magical Mystery Tour, which turns out to be the original title for the movie.
Speaking with the Empire Spoiler Special Film Podcast, Mangold said: “When I first pitched the movie to Kathy [Kennedy], Steven [Spielberg] and Harrison [Ford], what I was thinking, I was carrying this title in my head which was never going to work, because we’d have to clear that with The Beatles at an expense beyond all imagination. But it was Indiana Jones and the Magical Mystery Tour.
“When I came onto the movie I found the existing scripts were wanting to me. There were interesting adventures but they were adventures where the hero just happened to be old. His age and his place in the world seemed to have little consequence in the movie, which seemed to be to be a kind of invisible trait as you read the script.”
Interestingly, Ford “hated” the old Indy jokes in Crystal Skull and demanded such cuts from Dial of Destiny.
Mangold continued: “The second I took the Harrison I knew in my mind’s eye and started acting it out, it felt as though it would be one of these films where you have a movie star who’s older and the movie’s just somehow pretending he’s not. And that entire enterprise is kind of built on a Hollywood lie that people don’t age.
“Not only do our bodies age and our minds, but when we age we also experience the world around us changing from the world we were once comfortable and familiar. And that, even more than Harrison’s physical age needed to be the most important thing to wrestle with.”
Hence Indy waking up to 1960s Beatles music, a far cry from the 1930s of his adult prime.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is out now in cinemas.
