Harrison Ford to be de-aged for Indiana Jones 5, swears it won’t suck

A film studio must find digitally aged actors attractive. This allows you to tap into multiple generations of nostalgia and also eliminates the negative reactions that can come with changing a favorite character. All the better if, as in the new new Indiana Jones movie, it’s only for one scene. That way you can provide the kind of connective tissue required to legitimize a new sequel — especially one made 41 years after the original.

Empire Magazine published this latest information about the movie’s long-awaited release. It was part of a story that revealed some facts about the movie opening, such as the fact that Harrison Ford would be de-aged to the same age it will in the sequel.

James Mangold, directorLogan), the movie’s opening will be set in 1944 in a castle full of Nazis as Indy does all sorts of adventuring to get himself free. And, supposedly, he’ll do all of this looking about like his old Raiders of the Lost ArkHowever, it remains to be determined if the self will ever emerge.

After all, Disney, which is producing this movie under 20th Century Pictures, has a complicated history with de-aging and is responsible for some of the strangest and most jarring uses it’s had so far. Notoriously, the company recreated Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin and Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, with unintentionally strange and somewhat horrifying results, for Star Wars Story: Rogue One. Mixed results were also experienced by the series’ digitally aged Luke Skywalker. Mandalorian, pulling the actor’s voice back through the decades to 1983.

Netflix may be the best-known de-aging company, but not Disney. That studio is solely reponsible for Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman,It recreated Robert de Niro and Joe Pesci across several decades of in-movie stories with mixed results.

To help avoid any of these issues, Mangold worked with visual effects studio Industrial Light and Magic to work with new software that composites reams of archive footage of Ford’s younger self and matches it with newly shot footage, blending the two into something the team hopes will look seamless.

Indiana Jones 5Kathleen Kennedy (producer of Star Wars properties) is enthusiastic about the recent advances in digital de-aging technology.

“My hope is that, although it will be talked about in terms of technology, you just watch it and go, ‘Oh my God, they just found footage. This was a thing they shot 40 years ago’,” Kennedy told Empire.

The notoriously curmudgeonly Ford also shared a bit of Kennedy’s optimism. “This is the first time I’ve seen it where I believe it,” the actor told Empire. And while he’s certainly pretty obligated to say nice things about the movie, it’s worth remembering that of all the franchises he’s done, Ford’s never been shy about calling Indy is favorite, or about his desire to return to it. And that much love for the franchise has to be worth something, so maybe Ford wouldn’t have gotten on-board with the de-aging if he didn’t really think it worked.

Whatever the end result, we’ll have to wait until either the first footage of the movie premieres to see for ourselves, or maybe until its eventual June 30 release date.