To think that a genius like Steven Spielberg has some regrets about his star-studded career sounds like a lie, but in reality, it is actually the truth. What’s even more surprising is that this regret comes with one of his most critically acclaimed fan-favorite franchises of all time and one that launched Harrison Ford to extraordinary heights of success after Star Wars: the Indiana Jones saga.
While the filmmaker holds all the other movies in the film series in pretty much high regard, there is one movie in particular that Spielberg isn’t happy with and is disappointed with just how dark it turned out to be. This one movie was (unsurprisingly) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom from 1984 — the very one that the director didn’t even want to make in the first place.
Steven Spielberg “Wasn’t Happy” with Temple of Doom At All
Steven Spielberg has given the cinema some of the best films of all time, with the likes of Jaws, the Jurassic Park film series, and the Indiana Jones saga being some of his most cherished works to date. However, out of the lattermost franchise, the second movie in the film series in particular seems to have left the filmmaker disappointed to the core.
The reason behind this was because he considered it to be a bit “too dark,” as he expressed during an interview with the Sun Sentinel. As the director admitted:
I wasn’t happy with Temple of Doom at all. It was too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific. I thought it out-poltered Poltergeist.
In fact, he even claims that there is “not an ounce of my own personal feeling” in this specific Indiana Jones installment from 1984.
Obviously, that is enough criticism to last a lifetime, but that isn’t all. Since the pressure of making a sequel for the very first time in his career was immense, Spielberg ended up making something that he intended to please everyone with rather than making something he himself found to be a fatally attractive proposition.
Explaining his perspective claiming that “the danger in making a sequel is that you can never satisfy everyone,” the Schindler’s List helmer said:
If you give people the same movie with different scenes, they say: ‘Why weren’t you more original?’ But if you give them the same character in another fantastic adventure, but with a different tone, you risk disappointing the other half of the audience who just wanted a carbon copy of the first film with a different girl and a different bad guy. So you win, and you lose both ways.
Obviously, Spielberg’s point of view is as valid as ever, so it is only understandable why he considers this particular Harrison Ford-led Indiana Jones movie his “least favorite.” At the same time, the director also seems to believe that he was “fated” to curate this movie.
Still, Steven Spielberg Believes He was “Fated” to Make Temple of Doom
Made on a budget of $28 million, Temple of Doom managed to bring in a stunning $333 million, turning out to be a massive box office masterpiece (via The Numbers). However, the critical reviews it received at the time weren’t all that pretty, considering how, after the first film, many viewers thought this one would be a family movie as well just like the first one.
Despite this, George Lucas, who helped in the making of the film, had an undeterred opinion on it that was widely contrasting with Spielberg’s. Talking about the 1984 movie during an interview with Empire, Lucas said:
I love the movie, it’s just slightly darker in tone and not as fun as the first.
But while The Fablemans filmmaker truly hates the movie, he is still thankful for the one good thing that came out of making it: His meeting with the actress cum painter and his wife of more than three decades, Kate Capshaw.
As Spielberg expressed in the documentary Making of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom:
Temple of Doom is my least favourite of the trilogy. I look back and I say, ‘Well the greatest thing that I got out of that was I met Kate Capshaw.’ We married years later and that to me was the reason I was fated to make Temple of Doom.
Well, for whatever it’s worth, we’re happy that at least one thing about this adventure/action installment in the Indiana Jones film series turned out to Steven Spielberg’s liking!
You can watch Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on Prime Video.
