Indiana Jones Will Soon Have A New Streaming Home
The first four Indiana Jones films will stream on Disney+ starting on May 30.
Grab your whip and fedora because Dr. Henry Jones Jr. is coming to Disney+! Disney announced via Twitter that the first four Indiana Jones films will be available to stream on the platform starting May 31. That gives fans plenty of time to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, Last Crusade, and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull again before Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny comes to theaters on June 30.
When Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012, they didn’t just get Star Wars but the classic Indiana Jones action-adventure franchise as well. Previously, however, the movies have only been available to stream on Paramount+, the streaming service of Paramount Pictures, the company responsible for the first four Indy adventures. Now thanks to a deal between Paramount and Disney, that won’t be the case going forward.
The four theatrical Indiana Jones adventures aren’t the only thing starring the lovably salty archeologist coming to Disney+. Also announced recently is the addition of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles to the streamer. Young Indy was an edutainment series focusing on Indiana Jones as both an 8-10-year-old child and an older 16-21-year-old young man and inspired by the prequel section of Indian Jones and the Last Crusade.
The series was initially aired as a regular weekly show but was later re-edited into a series of television films retitled The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones. The show had a complicated and fascinating history you can read more about on the series’ Wikipedia page.
This announcement comes as great news to fans of the Indiana Jones series, who have been champing at the bit to get the beloved franchise on Disney+ where it rightfully belongs. Indy lovers on Twitter reacted to the news accordingly.
Unsurprisingly there were also a lot of Tweets making the same joke, “Don’t you mean three?” or “There are only three Indiana Jones movies!” in reference to the universally panned fourth Indiana Jones outing, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The fourth film is despised for several reasons, including Shia LaBeouf as Indy’s son Mutt, the CGI monkeys, and of course, the infamous scene of Jones hiding from a nuclear blast inside a lead-lined refrigerator. A scene so maligned that in some circles of the internet, “nuked the fridge” has replaced “jumped the shark” as a phrase used to denote a franchise’s declining quality.
There’s a good chance, however, that many of the people who claim to hate Crystal Skull haven’t seen it since its release in 2008. It’s been 15 years, making the 4th Indiana Jones movie ripe for a reevaluation much like the Star Wars prequels. That’s not to say that anyone is ever going to love the film, but fans may find that time has softened their opinion of it enough to “count” it as part of the series.
After all, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull isn’t a completely irredeemable sequel worthy of fans’ total and utter disregard for its existence that deserves to be stricken from the franchise and made non-canon. That’s Rocky V.
