As aforementioned, Crystal Skull did capture the audience more prone to spend disposable income on going to the movies in 2008. But even just the 13 to 25 year olds are now 28 to 40 years old, and the youngest members of the audience who saw the original Indy flick, Raiders of the Lost Ark, are at least pushing 50 today. Indiana Jones has always been a retro character, channeling nostalgia for movies and serials from the childhoods of baby boomers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. But when their generation stopped being the parents of the kids watching Indiana Jones, and Indy stopped resembling those kids’ grandparents, and instead became a call back to great-grandparents (or older), it’s worth considering if something’s been lost over the years.

The opening weekend tracking seems to bear this out. According to Deadline, 42 percent of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’s opening weekend audience was over the age of 45. That would be a problematic number even before the COVID-19 pandemic made large numbers of the 50-plus crowd showing up elusive unless your film stars Tom Cruise. For context, 48 percent of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’s audience was under the age of 25, with its largest demo being between the ages of 18 and 34, who made up 58 percent of the audience. Meanwhile 61 percent of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’s audience was between the ages of 18 and 34. That film is indeed the highest performing movie of the year with Gen-Z (young people between the ages of 11 and 26).

In other words, Indy’s most loyal audience is on the older side, and as when WB’s marketing asked audiences if they remember growing up with Michael Keaton as their Batman, a lot of Gen-Zers, the youngest of millennials, and literal kids just shrugged at seeing Ford don the fedora one last time. Many, it would seem, never saw him put it on the first time.

When contextualized with the rest of the industry, it is fair to wonder if audiences are reaching a tipping point from being inundated with movies that target our nostalgia—or at least the nostalgia of those who grew up in the ‘80s or shortly afterward in the ‘90s. Consider that the end of Ford’s original Indiana Jones trilogy and Keaton’s debut as Batman both came out in 1989. Someone born that year will soon be 35.

Meanwhile Disney’s kitchen sink approach to exploiting ‘80s nostalgia with the most popular film franchise of that era—Star Wars—has hit notorious snags as of late. It’s fair to point out that development of Dial of Destiny began back when Lucasfilm saw billion-dollar successes with Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), both of which leaned hard into nostalgia for the original Star Wars trilogy. Heck, The Force Awakens was marketed around Harrison Ford saying, “Chewie, we’re home.”

But by the end of that decade, and after three more Star Wars movies in consecutive years, the fanbase became wildly divided over the new films’ quality, culminating in the critically reviled Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), which while grossing $1 billion also earned a staggering 50 percent less than The Force Awakens of just four years earlier. Disney and Lucasfilm have pivoted for the time being to producing Star Wars content exclusively for Disney+ as a result, but that novelty has seemed to likewise worn thin, with the viewership numbers dropping dramatically between the first and third seasons of The Mandalorian.

Danofgeek