Much has been made of Indiana Jones 5’s $300 million budget, meaning that it was extremely hard for it to make a profit. It has left many wondering where exactly that gargantuan pile of cash went – but one clue seems to be the sheer amount of time and effort by over a hundred people that went into de-aging Harrison Ford.
In a new report in Variety, they explain that it took over 100 artists at Industrial Light and Magic three years to work on the Indiana Jones 5’s visual effects. This included developing new technology for the de-aging.
“That involved putting Harrison through the process of recording all the facial performances and all its extremes, and the marrying of various technologies by the artists to blend between one and the other to get the final performance that you’re looking for,” VFX supervisor Robert Weaver explained. “The important aspect is that there’s not a single recipe that was cooked up that could be done for all shots.”
Weaver added, “On the ILM side there were a few hundred artists involved in the process from start to finish, working on the various shots. They were working on every nuance in every shot. But we were able to achieve that because the reliance on the performance of Harrison was of utmost importance. He was the major driving force of what we needed to do for that opening act and make a younger act of that exact performance.”
Indiana Jones is currently at around $160 million in box office takings, so it’s not looking good in terms of it making enough to cover distribution and exhibition costs, on top of the exorbitant production budget. It turns out that the Indiana Jones movies aren’t as popular with younger generations as anticipated, and this could potentially have an impact on the popularity of legacy sequels in the future. This box office failure, combined with Ford’s age, makes Indiana Jones 6 look highly unlikely.
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