George Lucas' Original Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom Plan Could Have Destroyed The Franchise

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It's funny how "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" are both incredibly popular franchises that most fans agree have only a few movies that they legitimately like, while blaming the rest for ruining the franchise and cinema as a whole. If — out of five movies — you only really find "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" to be excellent films, do you really like the franchise, or just those two entries?

Before "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" redefined what a bad "Indiana Jones" movie could look like, it was "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" that created a rift in the fandom and was considered a widely controversial movie in terms of quality. It's a darker, meaner movie, one that (because of its status as a prequel) abandoned a lot of what people loved about "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (like Karen Allen's Marion Ravenwood) and seemingly contradicted Indy's unfamiliarity with the supernatural in the first movie. Not that "Temple" is without merit, of course. Harrison Ford looks better than ever as the famed archeologist, Ke Huy Quan is a phenomenal addition to the franchise, and the Thuggee sacrifice sequence is horrifically delightful in its ability to traumatize entire generations.

"Temple of Doom" came at a dark time for Spielberg and Lucas, with the former reeling from his involvement in a movie that got two kids and a man killed, and the latter having just ended his marriage. The script for what would eventually become the second "Indiana Jones" movie was so dark (despite being rated PG) that it scared away Lawrence Kasdan, who Lucas originally tapped to write the script.

Yet, as weird as "Temple of Doom" was and as bad as some people consider it to be, it could have been much, much worse. That's because George Lucas' original idea for the follow-up to "Raiders of the Lost Ark" was going to involve actual dinosaurs.

In the book "Mythmaker: The Life and Work of George Lucas," author John Baxter recounts how Paramount Pictures was pressuring Lucas about making a sequel to "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in 1982. When Lucas met Michael Eisner to talk about the project, he proposed a movie that would allow him to shoot in mainland China. "Lucas roughed out an opening in which Indy pursues a villain along the Great Wall on a motorbike," Baxter wrote. That sounds rather cool, but things quickly took a turn. Lucas "also visualized a sort of 'Lost World' pastiche, with a hidden valley inhabited by dinosaurs."

Unfortunately for Lucas, but thankfully for the rest of us, the Chinese authorities were not entirely ready to allow Western movies to shoot there at the time, at least not for the kind of money Paramount offered to shoot in the country. So the idea collapsed and Lucas went with his second plan, one about a cult and human sacrifices.

The "Indiana Jones" franchise is many things, and it does go to some wildly supernatural and fantastical places (inspired by movie serials from the '30s and '40s and films like "Gunga Din"), but they do not feature dinosaurs. A big part of the reason "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" failed so spectacularly was that it was a huge tonal departure for the franchise, since it drew inspiration from '50s B-movies and went more sci-fi. This is a franchise about ancient human eras. Sure, it deals with ancient powers and plenty of mythology, but we still only deal with humans — except in the fantastic video game "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle," which deals with Nephilim (giant-sized creatures). To have Indiana Jones meet a dinosaur would be a bridge too far, one the franchise would never recover from.

If you still have some morbid curiosity about what an "Indiana Jones" story involving a dinosaur could look like, the basic idea does live on in the 1996 book "Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs," by Max McCoy. In it, Indiana comes face-to-face with the last living Triceratops!