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?
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.
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.