For an anticipated title like this, I think they could have had the same box office figures if they spent zero on marketing. $100m is ridiculous.

No they wouldn't. Marketing spend it tied to distributor confidence in the film, which is then a lever that the sales department use to book the film on screens. On an average week there are multiple new films jostling for the same fixed amount of cinema screens.

I used to work in the marketing end of the industry, while I don't know all the nuts and bolts it's a very interesting business.

> which is then a lever that the sales department use to book the film on screens. On an average week there are multiple new films jostling for the same fixed amount of cinema screens.

This sounds like a zero-sum game. Someone's raking it in here.

I can't believe they went again after Crystal Skull. That was pretty bad as far as I remember (it also wasn't very memorable).

Who gets the majority of that 70-100 million? The FAANGs?

Here's an example from the UK in 2018:

https://stephenfollows.com/how-are-movie-advertising-budgets...

TV got most of it 5 years ago in the UK.

It wasn’t budget discipline that was the main problem.

Indiana Jones 4 didn’t need budget discipline.

The main problem was that Indiana Jones 5 was following 4, and both were laughably bad at being quality Indiana Jones-level movies.

The general audience knew in advance what they were getting wasn’t going to be exciting and they didn’t want it.

The hardcore fan audience also knew what they were getting: old-man Indie needs to be replaced by a strong brave female without character flaws, who points out how problematic and useless the old man is, and saves him from himself.

A big chunk of the budget overruns were when the pendulum slightly swung back and the studios did significant rewrites and reshoots (and re-CGI) to tone this type of writing down to something less overt.

Given the plot, I’m surprised it made as much as it did. Who wants that?

Name recognition counts for a lot.

This movie would have been a no-brainer home run if it were simply an adventure film starring a crusty Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, set in more or less the “real world”.

Once you get Indie into space aliens or Representation social politics things dilute until the audience shrugs and stays home to stream The Office for the sixth run-through.

Sad, alienated, lonely, somewhat suicidal Dr. Jones doesn’t put butts in seats. Who could’ve guessed?

Tom Cruise had a great success with Top Gun: Maverick by just pressing the Fan Service Button very hard, over and over and over. If instead he made a movie about the tough young woman fighter jock who rescues sad old Maverick from his complacency, the movie may have done better as a tax write off.

> Indiana Jones 4 didn’t need budget discipline.

It absolutely did. With budget discipline they would have made a better, more Indiana Jones movie. The direct result of having too much money available was that they stuck all manner of pointless garbage in the film and made it worse.

Adjusting for inflation, Indiana Jones 3 had less than half the budget of Indiana Jones 4 and is the better movie with the bigger box office.