Empire gave Indiana Jones 5 three stars. Disney lost $100 million.
The Original Review
“The fifth and seemingly final Indy adventure stands as a fitting send-off.”
The math ain't mathing. Empire awards Indy 5 three stars. Three out of five is sixty percent. Sixty percent is a passing grade. The film passed nothing.
Run the numbers. Production budget: $295 million. Marketing spend: estimated $100 million. Total cost: roughly $395 million. Worldwide gross: $384 million. Net result: a hole big enough to bury the Ark of the Covenant in. Disney's Q3 2023 earnings call literally cited the film as a writedown line item. That's not a star rating, that's a forensic accounting exhibit.
Empire's quote calls it 'a fitting send-off.' Send-offs aren't graded out of five. They're graded by whether the franchise survives. This one didn't. Lucasfilm has not announced an Indy 6. There is no Indy 6. There will be no Indy 6. The send-off was so fitting it sent the franchise directly off a cliff at terminal velocity.
Three stars also implies the film is more good than bad. Audiences disagreed. CinemaScore landed at a soft B+, the audience aggregate hovers in the low seventies, and repeat-viewing rates sit below franchise average. The third act features a 79-year-old archaeologist time-traveling through a wormhole to the Siege of Syracuse. The math on 'three stars' for 'Indy meets Archimedes via airborne plot device' does not function on any calculator I own.
Empire's franchise scoring follows a measurable pattern. Star Wars sequels averaged four stars while audience reception collapsed. Marvel Phase Four averaged three-and-a-half stars across the lowest-rated era of the franchise. Legacy IP receives a 1.5-star bonus regardless of output quality. That bonus is not earned. It is allocated. Allocated like ad inventory.
Three stars for a hundred-million-dollar loss. The dial of destiny dialed up exactly zero stars worth of destiny. The math ain't mathing and statistically speaking it never was.
