Out doing promotion for “The Adventures of Tintin”, Steven Spielberg sat down with Empire and the topic of two sequels to his most famous franchises came up – “Jurassic Park IV” and a fifth “Indiana Jones”.
In regards to the dinosaurs, Spielberg says “The screenplay is being written right now by Mark Protosevich. I’m hoping that will come out in the next couple of years. We have a good story. We have a better story for four than we had for three.”
With Indy, he’s waiting on George Lucas to come up with an appropriate story – “George is in charge of breaking the stories. He’s done it on all four movies. Whether I like the stories or not, George has broken all the stories. He is working on Indy V. We haven’t gone to screenplay yet, but he’s working on the story. I’ll leave it to George to come up with a good story.”
Spielberg also talked about the criticism of the fourth film. The basic breakdown – the skulls and the alien angle were a Lucas idea and Spielberg “never liked” it. But he will “always defer to George as the storyteller of the Indy series. I will never fight him on that.”
However the nuke the fridge moment? All Spielberg – “Blame me. Don’t blame George. That was my silly idea. People stopped saying “jump the shark”. They now say, “nuked the fridge”. I’m proud of that. I’m glad I was able to bring that into popular culture.”
About The Critic
