Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny are ahead!
After more than four decades of playing Indiana Jones across five movies and one episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Harrison Ford’s time as the fedora-wearing, whip-wielding archeologist is done. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ended things on a momentous note, with Indy and his goddaughter Helena briefly traveling back to the Siege of Syracuse in 212 BC, only to return to 1969, where Indy reconciled with his estranged wife, Marion Ravenwood. The final shot of the 2023 new movie release saw Indy grabbing his trademark hat off a clothesline, and director James Mangold has opened up about what this moment really means.
Mangold, who co-wrote the Dial of Destiny script with Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth and David Koepp, told EW that the movie’s final shot was meant to indicate that while the audience’s time with Indiana Jones is over, or at least with Ford’s incarnation of the character, Indy himself is never “giving up.” As the filmmaker explained:
I don't think he'll ever stop digging. And when he takes the hat off the clothesline, I think it's because, first of all, you shouldn't put hats on clotheslines. And second of all, no, I don't think he's done. I think that an ending doesn't mean that the characters never move again in their lives. It just means that you feel that you've entered a state of grace with their story.
Following the opening World War II sequence featuring a de-aged Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny picked up with the character 25 years later, on the day of his retirement from Hunter College. Additionally, he’s depressed over the death of his son, Shia LaBeouf’s Mutt, in Vietnam, which subsequently led to him and Marion separating. However, following his adventure with Helena across the globe and two millennia into the past, he had a touching reunion with Marion set up by Helena, which included a callback to the “Where does it hurt?” moment from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first time we saw them together.
So now that Indy’s back home and on good terms with Marion, James Mangold envisions that rather than taking it easy for the final years of his life, our intrepid protagonist will continuing adventuring. In fact, the director, who also helmed movies like Logan and Ford v Ferrari, has a specific idea on where Indy and Marion will go next:
I think he'll wake up tomorrow and want to do something. But whether he's going into battling Nazis through time portals again, I don't think so. But I could really imagine him and Marion going on a road trip to some Inca dig or to some dig in Montana or North Dakota and renting a cabin. And I could see him really enjoying his life as a retired archeologist.
The filmmaker further clarified that while Indy definitely retires from academia in The Dial of Destiny, he’ll never “retire from being an obsessive learner, thinker about the past and the future, and science and mankind.” Because once that happens, it’s “game over.” So while his days of uncovering artifacts like the Antikythera and punching Nazis along the way are finished, he and his wife will find other ways to keep busy on the archaeological front. We the moviegoers, however, will just have to imagine what they do next, whether you agree with Mangold’s idea or would rather them embark on different kinds of journeys.
If you’re interested in more coverage on Indiana Jones and tbe Dial of Destiny, check out our summary of how the movie’s time travel works, as well as our timeline of Indy and Marion’s relationship. If you’d rather look to the future, see what upcoming cinematic entertainment catches your eye with our 2023 movie schedule and 2024 movie schedule.
