Like all major franchises, the Indiana Jones series has worked its way through multiple ideas that never actually made it onto the screen, including one project that would’ve brought Indy into supernatural horror territory. Additionally, as it turns out, M. Night Shyamalan is one of the filmmakers who at one point in time conceived his own Indiana Jones movie!
Speaking with Collider while promoting his new movie Old, Shyamalan briefly touched upon the “darker idea” that he was brought in to pitch sometime after he made The Sixth Sense.
“Oh, my God. I mean, it was fantastic,” Shyamalan recalls. “Obviously, Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite movie of all time, and so this was a dream, to be asked as a kid to go see a movie in a movie theater and then later to be asked by that person to write one of those in the future. I could faint at that moment. It was amazing.”
The filmmaker continues, “I do have my notebooks; I still have those with all my ideas for that movie. I did have a take. I talked to everybody involved and it was so nascent at that time, that movie. Everyone hadn’t gotten into a room yet. They were bouncing ideas off of me. So everyone had different ideas of what to do. When you say that, I have in my head, it’s a green notebook, and I had this idea. It was a darker idea.”
Unfortunately, Shyamalan doesn’t reveal any specific details about his pitch. Of course, the project never came to life, and likely never made it far beyond that personal notebook. This would’ve been some years before Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull brought the franchise back to life in 2008, with a fifth movie currently in the works here in 2021.
Up next for Shyamalan, you ask? In the wake of Old, now in theaters, Shyamalan has another “weird and dark” movie in the works for Universal, likely another original thriller. More soon.