Another Indiana Jones film seems inevitable, doesn’t it? Do you even want it though? Speaking at the Deauville Film Festival this weekend, where he was given a lifetime contribution award, Harrison Ford revealed what he knew about the upcoming fifth outing for his adventuous alter ego; meanwhile, a video has been posted online showing Karen Allen talking last weekend at Dragon Con and spilling what few beans she had to share.

We’ll start with Karen’s input. This abbreviated video - cut short when the camcorder in use ran out of memory - shows her addressing the Dragon Con crowd. If you don’t want to see the whole thing, I’ll summarize what I think are the key points allow.

So, she thinks that an official announcement has been made and that according to an unnamed friend of hers that heard it, the film will be due in 2012. Hmmm. It seems somebody somewhere has gotten the wrong end of the stick - but the mistake here might just be the ‘official’ part, the info itself might be good. I guess it depends on who this friend is and where they get their info.

Harrison Ford’s statement is a little less fuzzy and infinitely more watertight.

According to Tout Le Cine, Ford told the assembled press at Deauville that he, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have agreed on the maguffin for the fifth film. Well, my translation software doesn’t say the ‘fifth maguffin’ but the ‘fifth element’ - I hope he wasn’t just talking about the Luc Besson movie.

Now that the premise is locked down and, according to Ford “George is working actively”, all that remains is to get a script written that they still all agree on. That might not be so easy.

Or, considering they all agreed on the script for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, perhaps they’ve stopped being at all ‘precious’ and writing a screenplay the three of them would rubberstamp will prove no more difficult than firing up Final Draft and headbutting the keyboard for a while.

I sincerely hope they never, ever shove Shia upfront and make an Indiana Jones sequel without Ford in the lead role. It’s his winking, twinkling demeanor that I watch them for in the first place.

Well, that and bitching about the law of diminishing returns.