As I’ve grown fond of touting, this is a historical summer where Lucasfilm has accidentally allowed not one but two non-Star Wars productions to go forward. On the forefront we have Indiana Jones 5, which has been blessed with a very smooth and incident-free…first two weeks. It seems while rehearsing a fight scene, Harrison Ford got understandably carried away with pretending to punch Nazis. Say Disney in a statement:
In the course of rehearsing for a fight scene, Harrison Ford sustained an injury involving his shoulder. Production will continue while the appropriate course of treatment is evaluated, and the filming schedule will be reconfigured as needed in the coming weeks.
Mary Bihr herself couldn’t have phrased it better! As online commentators seem downright giddy to point out, Harrison Ford taking abuse while filming is something of a tradition. Perhaps most notably, the star suffered a herniated disc on the set of Temple of Doom, an injury which kept the star out of pocket for over a month and led Spielberg to shoot as much as he could with Ford’s stuntman (the inestimable Vic Armstrong) before production was outright shut down for several weeks. The scuttlebutt is that Ford may need a month or so to recover from this latest injury, though for the moment production seems to be trying to work around his absence.
This is obviously not good news, and it’s getting downright suspicious how many setbacks this particular project seems to be given to (Forget microchip conspiracies; somebody obviously doesn’t want this movie to get made), but we’ve been here before, and presumably things will resume after whatever hiatus proves necessary. Of course, Option B would be to just do what they did on Raiders when logistical hangups meant a planned fight scene couldn’t be shot as storyboarded:
While Indy is in the infirmary, it seems that neither God nor man can interfere with the Willow streaming series, which some* have called the most anticipated release of all time. Production on the show commenced in Wales several weeks back, and it’s been announced that director Stephen Woolfenden (Outlander) has joined Jonathan Entwistle in tackling at least one episode of the season. And you’d have to have a heart of acorn-induced stone to not be cheered on some level by the spotting of Warwick Davis on a Willow set again.
Now let’s get this thing in the can and released and spawning a point ‘n click Willow game.
*Citation needed
I did appreciate not having dumb messages before the movie started saying that it was made in a different time, cause you can figure that out for yourself mathematically and all that message serves to do is delay the start of the movie. Same as those annoying anti-piracy messages... I already bought the movie!
I guess there are always people that do the wrong thing, or need to be told that times have changed, eh?
No new features of note from the previous bluray release.
Either way, 5/5 Bullwhips.
Now we wait to see what Indy 5 looks like...
On Ford's injury, I saw some scuttlebutt saying he may be out as long as September. Hopefully that isn't the case and he recovers soon.