Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a fan-favorite installment from the swashbuckling thriller franchise, and it would be difficult to imagine that it almost had a completely different plot. Part of the reason viewers loved it was the exploration of Indy and his father’s relationship.
The original script for the third Indiana Jones film hardly ventured into the elements found in The Last Crusade. The coveted Holy Grail and Sean Connery’s Henry were not even present. George Lucas, producer of the franchise, pitched ideas to Spielberg, which the latter repeatedly rejected.
Steven Spielberg Turned Down George Lucas’ Ideas For Indiana Jones 3
According to Den of Geek, the first original script involved a haunted castle in Scotland. George Lucas suggested this concept for the sequel, but it was rejected. He tried it again for the third movie and even hired Diane Thomas to write the draft, who was famous for penning Romancing The Stone.
Steven Spielberg had to drop it after noticing how close it was to one of his earlier works, Poltergeist. Not that Indiana Jones won’t tackle ghosts, but he felt like treading the same path again.
The second script was to be titled Indiana Jones and the Monkey King, where the titular hero would find himself in the lost city of Sun Wu King. The concept almost pushed through before getting scrapped again. Lucas even hired The Goonies’ Chris Columbus to pen the script, where Indy would be competing against the Nazis in quest of the Garden of Immortal Peaches.
The scene will start in Scotland while Indy investigates ghostly murders, but a conversation with Marcus Brody will lead him to Africa. He would meet a 200-year-old pygmy who would hand him a map to the lost city, where the Fountain of Youth is found. Indy would eventually get killed in the film, but his newfound friend would revive him through the Garden of Immortal Peaches.
As enticing as this sounds, Spielberg ended up shelving the idea for fear that the story would be far-fetched and ridiculous, and might also get him in trouble for racially stereotyping characters.
In the end, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas returned to the Holy Grail script, something that the director had been skeptical about. Well, it’s no secret that the Indiana Jones franchise has a habit of reusing discarded plots.
George Lucas Badly Wanted A Haunted Castle In Indiana Jones
The Indiana Jones films became one of the most successful and long-enduring franchises in history, and George Lucas’ love for horror and the supernatural is quite evident. While he never got the horror version of Indiana Jones that he liked, he was able to incorporate some elements of it in the films, such as the haunted castle in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He told Vanity Fair:
“Indiana Jones films are supernatural mystery movies. They’re always going after some supernatural object. It’s not a pretend object. It’s not something that we made up. It’s something that actually exists, or people believe exists—whether it does or not is in dispute.”
Despite these original concepts not making it past the conception stage, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade proved to be a major commercial and critical success to the franchise, and it also propelled Harrison Ford’s career to new heights.
Indiana Jones movies are available on Disney+.
Sources: Den of Geek, Vanity Fair
RELATED: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Review: Fun Enough, But the Series Finally Jumps the Shark
