Indiana Jones started as George Lucas's tribute to the cliffhanger serials of the 1930s and 1940s, and Steven Spielberg turned the idea into Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981. Harrison Ford put on the fedora and leather jacket and became Dr. Henry Walton Jones Jr., a Marshall College archaeology professor who spends his time away from the classroom grabbing relics before the Nazis can get to them. One movie grew into five, plus a prequel TV series, a long run of LucasArts adventure games, comics at Marvel and Dark Horse, and rides at Disney parks on three continents.
The franchise has had an uneven stretch since Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny closed out Ford's run in 2023 and lost money, while MachineGames' Indiana Jones and the Great Circle picked up strong reviews and passed four million players on Xbox and PC within two months. Ford is now lending his face to a new Animal Kingdom ride instead of another sequel, and Marvel has a new Indy comic arriving in December, so the character is far from retired even without a movie on the calendar.
There are five Indiana Jones movies, all starring Harrison Ford and all scored by John Williams. Steven Spielberg directed the first four, and James Mangold took over for the fifth. In release order, the films are Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023).
Chronological order shuffles the first two. Temple of Doom is a prequel set in 1935, a year before Raiders takes place in 1936. Last Crusade follows in 1938, Crystal Skull jumps to 1957, and Dial of Destiny lands in 1969. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is set in 1937, so the game slots neatly between Raiders and Last Crusade.
Raiders of the Lost Ark introduces Indy in 1936, opening with the golden idol and the rolling boulder in a Peruvian temple before US Army intelligence hires him to beat the Nazis to the Ark of the Covenant. Karen Allen plays Marion Ravenwood, the daughter of Indy's old mentor, who is running a bar in Nepal when Indy shows up looking for her father's headpiece. Paul Freeman plays René Belloq, the rival archaeologist working with the Nazis, John Rhys-Davies plays Sallah in Cairo, and Denholm Elliott plays Marcus Brody back at the college.
Tom Selleck was the original pick for the role but couldn't get out of his Magnum, P.I. contract, which opened the door for Ford, who was already Han Solo in Star Wars. Raiders won five Academy Awards, four competitive plus a Special Achievement Award for sound effects editing. Its ending, with the opened Ark wiping out Belloq and every Nazi who looks inside it, set up the supernatural payoff that every Indiana Jones movie since has built its finale around.
Temple of Doom is a prequel set in 1935. After a shootout at Shanghai's Club Obi Wan, Indy, nightclub singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) and his young sidekick Short Round (Ke Huy Quan) crash-land in India, where a village asks Indy to recover its sacred Sankara stone and its missing children. The trail leads to Pankot Palace and the Thuggee cult run by Mola Ram, played by Amrish Puri.
The movie is darker and meaner than Raiders, with the heart-removal ritual and the mine cart chase standing out as its big set pieces. Its violence, along with Gremlins the same summer, pushed the MPAA to create the PG-13 rating. Kate Capshaw later married Spielberg, and Ke Huy Quan won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2023.
Last Crusade opens in 1912 with River Phoenix as a teenage Indy in Utah, a prologue that explains the hat, the whip, the scar on his chin and his fear of snakes in one chase. The main story jumps to 1938, when Indy learns his estranged father, Professor Henry Jones Sr., has vanished while searching for the Holy Grail. Sean Connery plays Henry Sr., and the father and son bickering across Venice, Austria and the desert of Hatay is the reason plenty of fans rank this one first.
Julian Glover plays Walter Donovan, the American businessman funding the Nazi expedition, and Alison Doody plays Elsa Schneider, the Austrian art historian working both sides. Michael Byrne, who played the Nazi Colonel Vogel, died on June 20, 2026 at 82. The film also answers where the name Indiana came from, with Henry Sr. revealing it belonged to the family dog.
Ford returned 19 years later for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, set in 1957 with Soviet agents replacing the Nazis. Cate Blanchett plays Colonel Irina Spalko, a Soviet psychic researcher hunting a crystal skull tied to the lost city of Akator, and Shia LaBeouf plays Mutt Williams, a greaser who turns out to be Indy's son with Marion. Karen Allen came back as Marion, with Ray Winstone as Indy's double-crossing partner Mac and John Hurt as Harold Oxley. The movie ends with Indy and Marion finally getting married.
The alien angle split audiences, and the scene where Indy survives a nuclear test inside a lead-lined refrigerator gave the internet the phrase "nuke the fridge." It still grossed nearly $790 million worldwide, the highest box office in the series before adjusting for inflation.
Dial of Destiny is Ford's final film as Indy and the only one Spielberg didn't direct, with James Mangold stepping in. It opens in 1944 with a digitally de-aged Ford fighting Nazis on a train, then jumps to 1969, where a retiring Indy is living alone in New York after Mutt's death in Vietnam and his separation from Marion. His goddaughter Helena Shaw, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, drags him into a race against former Nazi scientist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) for Archimedes' Antikythera, a device Voller believes can find fissures in time. John Rhys-Davies returns as Sallah, and Antonio Banderas has a small role as a diver named Renaldo.
The finale sends Indy, Helena and Voller back to the Siege of Syracuse in 212 BC, where Indy wants to stay and meet Archimedes until Helena knocks him out and brings him home. Marion returns in the final scene. The film premiered at Cannes to mixed reviews, and against a reported budget of around $300 million it grossed roughly $384 million worldwide, a result widely reported as a major loss for Disney.
George Lucas produced The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for ABC, which ran from 1992 to 1993 across two seasons and 28 episodes. Corey Carrier played Indy as a boy traveling the world with his father, Sean Patrick Flanery played him as a teenager and young man fighting in World War I, and George Hall played a 93-year-old Indy who introduced many of the episodes. The show leaned harder on history than action, with Indy crossing paths with real figures like Pancho Villa, T. E. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway.
Harrison Ford made a cameo as a 50-year-old Indy in the 1993 episode Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues. Four TV movies followed between 1994 and 1996, and the whole series was later re-edited into 22 feature-length chapters as The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones.
Indy has been in video games almost as long as he's been in theaters. Raiders of the Lost Ark hit the Atari 2600 in 1982, designed by Howard Scott Warshaw, who also made E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the same console. Atari Games followed with the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom arcade cabinet in 1985.
Lucasfilm Games adapted the third movie as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure in 1989. I got it as part of a bundle with Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, Maniac Mansion and a few other LucasArts adventures, and while it wasn't my favorite LucasArts game, it was certainly a memorable one.
The studio, renamed LucasArts by then, followed it with Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis in 1992. Fate of Atlantis is an original story set in 1939 that teams Indy with psychic Sophia Hapgood against Nazis hunting orichalcum and the lost city of Atlantis. The game splits into three separate paths, called Team, Wits and Fists, and a lot of fans still treat it as the real fourth Indiana Jones movie.
LucasArts moved Indy into 3D with Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine in 1999, a 1947 Cold War story about the Tower of Babel that drew constant comparisons to Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider games. Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb followed in 2003 as a 1935 prequel to Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings arrived on Wii, PS2, DS and PSP in 2009.
Traveller's Tales released LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures in 2008, covering the original trilogy, then followed it with LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues in 2009, which added Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Both games use the same co-op formula the studio built with LEGO Star Wars.
MachineGames, the Swedish studio behind the modern Wolfenstein games, developed Indiana Jones and the Great Circle with Lucasfilm Games, and Bethesda published it with Todd Howard as executive producer. Microsoft's purchase of ZeniMax put it on Xbox first, and it launched December 9, 2024 on Xbox Series X|S and PC, including day one on Game Pass. The PlayStation 5 version followed on April 17, 2025.
The story is set in 1937, and Troy Baker voices Indy with a performance built closely on Ford's. It opens by recreating the Raiders idol scene in Peru, then a giant named Locus, played by the late Tony Todd, breaks into Marshall College and steals a seemingly worthless cat mummy. That theft sends Indy to Vatican City, Gizeh, the Himalayas, Shanghai and Siam, chasing Nazi archaeologist Emmerich Voss (Marios Gavrilis) and a ring of ancient sites called the Great Circle, with Italian journalist Gina Lombardi (Alessandra Mastronardi) along for most of the ride.
The game plays almost entirely in first person, switching to third person for climbing and cutscenes. Guns are there, but most encounters reward sneaking around or knocking enemies out with whatever Indy can grab, from frying pans to shovels. The first-person choice drew skepticism before launch, and MachineGames leaned into it by building many of the puzzles around Indy's camera and journal.
The Order of Giants story DLC launched September 4, 2025 on every platform. Set during the main game's Vatican chapter, it sends Indy beneath Rome with a young priest named Father Ricci to dig into the Nephilim Order, the secret society of giants that Locus belongs to. A Nintendo Switch 2 version arrived May 12, 2026, running at 30 frames per second with added gyro and mouse controls.
Marvel published The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones from 1983 to 1986, running 34 issues of original stories alongside its adaptations of the films. Dark Horse took over the license in the early 1990s, starting with a Fate of Atlantis adaptation, and kept Indy through the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull era.
Marvel brings Indy back with Indiana Jones and the Sword of Pandemonium, a five-issue miniseries from writer Jason Aaron and artist Aaron Kuder, with issue one due December 9, 2026. Set shortly after Raiders, it has Indy's old enemies, including one who shouldn't be alive, going after a new source of power that has ended up with Marion, which sends Indy around the globe after a biblical weapon. A pair of Further Adventures hardcovers collecting the 1980s run came out in September.
Disney has run Indiana Jones attractions since 1989, when the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular opened at what is now Disney's Hollywood Studios. Disneyland Paris added Indiana Jones et le Temple du Péril in 1993, Disneyland opened Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Forbidden Eye in 1995, and Tokyo DisneySea followed with Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Crystal Skull in 2001.
The next one is Indiana Jones and the Myth of the Jade Serpent, announced at D23 in August 2026 for the new Tropical Americas land at Disney's Animal Kingdom. It reuses the ride system from the former DINOSAUR attraction, sends riders into the Maya underworld and builds to a showdown with a giant serpent. Harrison Ford revealed in a video message that he is the physical model for the ride's Indy Audio-Animatronics figure, the first time his likeness has been used for one at any Disney park. Tropical Americas is slated to open in 2027.
No sixth Indiana Jones movie has been announced as of November 2026, and Ford has been clear that Dial of Destiny was his last time playing Indy on screen. Kathleen Kennedy, who stepped down as Lucasfilm president in January 2026, said in her exit interview with Deadline that she doesn't think Indy will ever be finished but doesn't see anyone at the studio interested in exploring him right now. Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan took over Lucasfilm as co-leaders.
Around the same time, reports surfaced that Lucasfilm had quietly cancelled an animated Indiana Jones series, code-named Reggie after the snake on the plane in Raiders, that would have told stories set between the films. Rumors of a full reboot with a new actor have floated since 2025 without anything official. On the game side, MachineGames job listings have fueled talk of a Great Circle sequel, but neither Xbox nor Bethesda has announced one.
There are five Indiana Jones movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Temple of Doom (1984), The Last Crusade (1989), Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) and The Dial of Destiny (2023). Harrison Ford stars in all five.
Temple of Doom (1935) comes first, followed by Raiders of the Lost Ark (1936), Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (1937), The Last Crusade (1938), Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (1957) and Dial of Destiny (1969). The opening of Last Crusade flashes back to 1912 with River Phoenix as a teenage Indy.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is set in 1937, between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is on Xbox Series X|S, PC, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2. It launched on Xbox and PC in December 2024, came to PS5 in April 2025 and reached Switch 2 on May 12, 2026.
Troy Baker voices Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
No sixth Indiana Jones movie has been announced as of November 2026. Harrison Ford has said Dial of Destiny was his final film as Indy, and Lucasfilm hasn't announced a recast or reboot.
His real name is Henry Walton Jones Jr. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade reveals he took the name Indiana from the family dog, a nod to George Lucas's real Alaskan Malamute named Indiana.
River Phoenix played a teenage Indy in the opening of Last Crusade. In The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Corey Carrier played him as a boy and Sean Patrick Flanery played him as a teen and young adult.
Steven Spielberg directed the first four Indiana Jones movies. James Mangold directed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.