Its called …. National Jones: The Family Feud!

And who will read the questions?
Tom Hanks!

Just the entire movie (save for a few cool scenes in the beginning) was utter trash. Marion was unnecessary, Mutt’s character was unnecessary, etc.

Really, if they’re going to do another film, they need to take it back and do one set earlier. Not that I’ll be necessarily seeing it, because Lucas and Spielberg failed so miserably on this one.

Mutt was unnecessary and an annoying distraction except for the motorcycle chase in Connecticut.

Giving your hero a son AND marrying him off is franchise suicide, especially for something like Indiana Jones, the previous entries of which were always pretty romantic and lighthearted fare that never dealt in absolutes. The endings of the previous three made it clear that the stories ended happily, but there was nothing to indicate they were ending happily ever after. In fact, I’d argue that all three ended more with the sense that the next adventure was just around the corner.

Yet the ending of Crystal Skull leaves Spielberg and Lucas little wiggle room. It’s obvious that they were preparing to hand over the reigns if not the whip to the Mutt character if he proved a success and having done that, this leaves two options: they continue with Mutt in a primary role in a spinoff franchise… or they continue with Indy in a primary role, in more or less an Indy sequel with Mutt merely supporting him if he’s seen at all.

If it’s the former, you deal with the inevitable fan outrage, as well as the even money chance that Harrison Ford declines to appear.

And if it’s the latter, you’ve tied your hands narratively:

1) With Indy married, a lighthearted romantic subplot won’t be injected to grease the engine of the plot as it did so well in the first three and failed spectacularly to do in the fourth. People may sneer at this, but a fresh romance for Indy is as essential a plot element as a fresh relic for him to chase after and is I think a big reason why Indy 4 felt so stale. Each movie has been a journey of new discoveries and Spielberg and Lucas seemed determined to make this one a story of revisitations: bring back an old flame, recycle the father/son material mined in both Temple and Crusade, and have Indy journey to only two exotic locales, both of which have been done to death in the series (i.e. jungles and deserts).

2) On the issue of Mutt, if he is present in supporting role ala Skull then any storyline between him and Indy will inevitably feel like old news, a been there done that, this-is-going-nowhere slice of why’d they do that?

And on the flip side to my long argument — this movie still made a heap of cash around the world, so who knows if Indy 5 ever happens. I would have said as little as two years ago that we’d never seen a fourth!