We spoke with writer/director David Koepp, whose amazing fresh horror movie You Should Have Left, makes its debut on VOD second week from Universal and Blumhouse. Koepp wrote and led You Should Have Left, but is mostly known as one of the most Prosperous screenwriters in Hollywood history, having penned these juggernauts as Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, Mission: Impossible, War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. For a little while, he was operating on the perpetually delayed fifth Indiana Jones film, but Koepp told me that was not the case anymore.
We inquired about the status of the job and whether or not he was attached, reiterating rumors which he had been replaced, at one stage, together with Jonathan Kasdan. “Not anymore,” Koepp explained. This largely has to do with Steven Spielberg, who had led any entry in the franchise, opting to walk away. James Mangold, who recently helmed Ford v. Ferrari, has taken over. “When James Mangold came in… he deserves an opportunity to take his shot at it. I’d done several variations with Steven. When Steven abandoned, it seemed like the ideal time to allow Jim to have his own take on it and also have his very own individual or himself compose it.”
So there you have whichever version of Indiana Jones 5 we eventually get, likely won’t have a lot to do with what Spielberg and Koepp had been toiling away on, even though there is a possibility it could be utilized as a springboard. Naturally, this is not exactly new for its franchise, which has been defined earlier ideas’ cannibalization as well as by both screenplays.
The next film, as an instance, was intended to be a haunted house movie, but Spielberg ultimately rejected it as being too similar to Poltergeist. They moved a pseudo-haunted castle series into the next movie and borrowed new components of Lawrence Kasdan’s original draft of Raiders of the Lost Ark for its sequel.
More recently, there were several scripts written for the fourth movie and entirely abandoned, beginning from the mid-1990s with Indiana Jones and the Monkey King by Chris Columbus, Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars by Jeb Stuart and Jeffrey Boam, along with Indiana Jones and the Town of Gods by Frank Darabont. Darabont’s script, for instance, interpolated elements of this Stuart/Boam script and even Koepp’s ultimate script for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, imports much from Darabont’s thrilling screenplay.
Here is what Koepp had to tell us about his involvement with Indiana Jones 5. Start looking for more in my interview with Koepp.
