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Why Shia LaBeouf Could Never Be Indiana Jones
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May 9, 2025
Indiana Jones is one of the most celebrated film franchises in history. Mostly due to the titular character of Indiana Jones, but proven through the attempted "passing of the torch" in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It seems any time a major franchise like Indiana Jones attempts this move in order to stretch the franchise, it fails spectacularly.
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Name's Mutt. Mutt Williams
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Mutt? Yeah. What kind of name is that? So when I picked, you got a problem with it
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There's no getting around that maintaining a franchise is a tricky beast
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From updating timelines, shifting tones, to rewriting origin stories, there's no surefire certainty to any method
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But one strategy, taken by Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
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is almost always a guaranteed failure. passing a legacy on by handing the reins to a new character
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What is it exactly about trying to pass the torch within a movie
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that tries to please everyone and satisfies nobody? His name is Henry
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Henry, good name. He's your son. My son? Released in 2008, Crystal Skull was the fourth Indiana Jones movie
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following The Last Crusade, released in 1989. Skull's screenplay had multiple drafts from over five writers
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including Frank Durabont and series co-creator George Lucas. After almost 20 years, expectations were incredibly high
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We all wondered how the aging Ford would slip back into his iconic leather coat and fedora
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What we got was a strange movie. The broad strokes are, Indy is approached by a young quasi-greaser named Mutt Williams
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and asked to search for the boy's missing father figure, who happens to be Indy's friend, Harold Oxley
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This starts the movie's traditional Indiana Jones-esque float-trotting adventure before trading the treasure hunter tropes of its past for atomic age era sci-fi
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While your mileage may vary, the key takeaway was the introduction of Mutt Williams
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played by actor Shia LaBeouf. Before the movie's release, rumors started to whirl about bringing LaBeouf
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to take over the franchise as our adventuring lead, and even without seeing the divisive film people were immediately opposed So you firing me A leave of absence is all A definite leave of absence To date the franchise has made almost 2 billion worldwide
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In today's landscape, as franchises like the Marvel Universe and Fast and Furious
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total in the billions of dollars, it makes absolute sense to keep going
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As the world craves more familiarity and nostalgia, theoretically, adding a new, younger actor to carry on the legacy of Indiana Jones
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gives the series a set of legs that could possibly let it run past the aforementioned behemoths
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Only those movies were always ensemble pieces. Indiana Jones is simply about Indiana Jones
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Side characters have come and gone, but the focal point has always been on the titular character
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No more adventures with you, Dr. Jones. Sweetheart. After all the fun we've had together
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Harrison Ford has been called the luckiest man in Hollywood, often by himself, a former carpenter
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who became Han Solo, the fugitive's Dr. Kimball, and Blade Runner's Rick Deckard. But it's not just
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luck that has carried Ford along. There's an endearing gruffness and sense of play in his
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roles, which fits Indy perfectly. Ford walks the line between dignified teacher and world-weary
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treasure hunter effortlessly. You're a teacher? Part-time. Franchises are designed to appease us
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There's a comfort in their consistency. When we watch what we think will be another adventure
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with Dr. Jones and are left with a watered-down greaser, our sense of comfort disappears
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This is most often the problem of trying to pass the torch to a new character
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Oftentimes, they're simply unlikable. On paper, if we describe Indiana as a curmudgeonly adventurer
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who believes in taking artifacts from their natural resting place to be set in a museum, he sounds kind of awful
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But when we watch Indy shout, That belongs in a museum through a torrential downpour we cheer We buy into the idea that he is doing this for good for education and not wealth
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In contrast, when Indy and Mutt meet at a diner to discuss the missing Harold Oxley
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Mutt just comes across as a jerk. From stealing beer off a serving tray
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to unprompted temper tantrums, it all just seems kind of childish. Shut up
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That's my mother you're talking about. You don't have to get sore all the time just to prove how tough you are
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Sit down. At this point, a lot of us had seen a child Indy in the young Indiana Jones Chronicles
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and Last Crusade's cold open, and that kid still seemed more mature and put together than Mutt
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One aspect of Indy that has always shined was his ability to deflect being anything more than a
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professor. We would then watch him do something amazing like dangle from tank treads or bring a
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gun to a sword fight, but his attitude was never one of hollow declaration. Mutt, on the other hand
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was pretty braggadocious, while not always delivering. Nice try, kid, but I think you just brought a knife to a gunfight
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Despite the numerous failures in trying to pass the torch, we have learned that success is not an impossibility
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In 2015, George Miller released the long-awaited Mad Max Fury Road. Fury Road was less about Max Roktansky
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and more about Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron. Instead of making Furiosa a sidekick or secondary character
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Fury Road made her a main character with her own wants and needs that were independent of Max
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While Mutt had his own reasons for searching for Ox, they were all entangled with Indy
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From discovering they were father and son to bringing back legacy character Marion Ravenwood
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the whole thing seemed designed to build a family of adventurers together
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Fury Road was so steadfast on establishing Furiosa in her own right that the ending of
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the movie had Max literally disappearing into a crowd as Furiosa was individually celebrated It a wonderful moment one that feels so much more earned than the ending of Crystal Skull where Indy stops Mutt from donning the iconic fedora
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Rumors have been circulating that this was supposed to be a handoff, and as the final minutes ticked by
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the movie itself seemed unsure of what to do now. I've got a bad feeling about this
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Even when a film does seem steadfast on passing the torch, more often than not, it comes up shorthanded
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When A Good Day to Die Hard tried to establish Jai Courtney as the only briefly mentioned John McClane Jr.
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everything felt so forced. We were expected to believe we should care about this character based solely on a name
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It was the same when Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol seemed to insist we believe in Jeremy Renner's Will Brandt
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as much as the cast we had spent so much of our lives with. Conversely, studios have also done a hard pivot in some legacy sequels that don't feature the original protagonists
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with projects like The Bourne Legacy or Tron Legacy to middling results
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No one thinks of Garrett Hedlund when they hear the name Tron. That's not to say we don't care or don't want change
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Characters like Ironheart and X-23 have managed to capture the imaginations of a new audience
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and that's frankly beautiful to see. The difference lies in establishing those characters on their own
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instead of a one-to-one replacement. Why'd you stick around, Junior? I don't know
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Why didn't you, Dad? Letting go of a character can be hard
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Too often, a passing the torch trope feels like we're letting go of a memory
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but it doesn't have to be like that. We are often too quick to forget that we never knew we needed Indiana Jones running away from a boulder
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or John McClane crawling through a vent. When the creators take the time to sincerely craft a new character
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and give them their own identity and story, we remember why we fell in love in the first place
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and all the possibilities or adventure that lie ahead
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