Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has proved a disappointment at the US and international box office on its first week of release, a second successive setback for a supposed Hollywood tentpole movie after The Flash failed to set audiences alight earlier in June.
While the film opened at No 1 at the US box office, its estimated opening weekend total of $60m is at the low end of its predictions – and under half of the $120.7m that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse achieved on its first weekend. By comparison, The Flash took $55m on its opening three days. Dial of Destiny’s non-US box office also disappointed, with 52 territories recording an estimated $70m, to make the film’s total opening weekend $130m, for a film that is rumoured to have cost around $300m to make.
Deadline’s box office analyst Anthony D’Alessandro ascribes this “disastrous result” partly to Disney’s decision to stage a premiere at Cannes – always a risky proposition for a publicity conscious studio – where it received largely middling reviews. It’s also possible that, despite the widespread esteem in which he is held, lead Harrison Ford’s box-office clout is not what it was; his previous star vehicle, the adventure film The Call of the Wild, was also a box office disappointment, losing its studio an estimated $50m.
Other retro-facing blockbusters have proved more resilient: Top Gun Maverick made $126.7m on its opening weekend in May 2022; D’Alessandro suggests that another of Dial of Destiny’s problems was that it remained set in its ways and made “no efforts … to cast-it-up and make it appealing to an under-40, diverse crowd”.
Attention now switches to the global release of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One in the second week of July, and the face-off between toy-comedy Barbie and atomic-bomb drama Oppenheimer a week later.
