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Indiana Jones’ Box Office Destiny? A Lukewarm $60 Million Debut in North America 

US actor Harrison Ford poses on the red carpet upon arrival for the UK Premiere of "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny", at the Cineworld Leicester Square, central London, on June 26, 2023. (AFP)
US actor Harrison Ford poses on the red carpet upon arrival for the UK Premiere of "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny", at the Cineworld Leicester Square, central London, on June 26, 2023. (AFP)
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Indiana Jones’ Box Office Destiny? A Lukewarm $60 Million Debut in North America 

US actor Harrison Ford poses on the red carpet upon arrival for the UK Premiere of "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny", at the Cineworld Leicester Square, central London, on June 26, 2023. (AFP)
US actor Harrison Ford poses on the red carpet upon arrival for the UK Premiere of "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny", at the Cineworld Leicester Square, central London, on June 26, 2023. (AFP)

Indiana Jones, and executives at the Walt Disney Co. and Lucasfilm, made a somewhat dispiriting discovery this weekend. Moviegoers didn’t rush to the theater in significant numbers to see “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and say goodbye to Harrison Ford as the iconic archaeologist.

The film, reportedly budgeted north of $250 million, came in on the lower end of projections with $60 million in ticket sales from 4,600 North American theaters, according to studio estimates Sunday.

Including $70 million from international showings in 52 markets, “Dial of Destiny” celebrated a $130 million global opening. It easily earned the No. 1 title but was not the high-rolling sendoff for one of modern cinema’s most iconic actor/character pairings that anyone hoped. Disney is projecting that it will make $82 million domestically through the fourth of July holiday and $152 million globally.

“Dial of Destiny” is the long-delayed fifth installment in the Steven Spielberg/George Lucas-created adventure series that began in 1981, and the first Spielberg himself hasn’t directed. Veteran James Mangold stepped in to take the reins overseeing the Spielberg-approved script, which finds an older Dr. Jones retiring from his university job and swept up on a new adventure with his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge).

“It’s impressive that a franchise that’s over 40 years old is No. 1 at the box office. But there’s no question there were higher hopes for the debut of this movie,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “This is Indiana Jones. This is a summer movie icon.”

The film made its splashy premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, with a fitting celebration of Ford, who has said this was his last time playing the character.

But then it was hit with lukewarm reviews. This was an unexpected and unwelcome hurdle, considering it was coming after the maligned fourth film, 2008’s “Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” Another contributing snag was that a significant portion of the target audience, older viewers, don’t tend to buy many tickets on opening weekend for big blockbusters. But even “Crystal Skull,” budgeted at a reported $185 million, managed to gross over $790 million.

“Sometimes reviews don’t matter, but the sentiment coming out of Cannes was very powerful,” Dergarabedian said. “It set off a narrative where people were already feeling disappointed and they hadn’t even seen it.”

Second place went to “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” with $11.5 million, bringing its domestic total to around $340 million. “Elemental” landed in third place with $11.3 million.

Aside from “Dial of Destiny,” the weekend’s other main new opener was the animated “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken,” which debuted in sixth place with $5.2 million.

“Dial of Destiny’s” underwhelming debut comes just a few weeks after both Warner Bros.’ “The Flash” and Disney/Pixar’s “Elemental” had lackluster openings in North America. “Elemental,” like Indy 5, also premiered at Cannes to middling reception.

And yet, “Elemental” in its three weeks in theaters has held on much better than “The Flash,” which plummeted again to $5 million, bringing its domestic total to $99.3 million. Disney also saw similarly promising holds with “The Little Mermaid,” now at over $280 million domestically and “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” which has grossed over $345 million. After the holiday, Disney will be responsible for nearly half of the summer box office earnings.

“The entire story isn’t told on the opening weekend,” Dergarabedian said.

Disney has a “clear weekend” ahead with no competing blockbusters, when studio heads can reasonably hope for more families and older audiences to buy tickets. But things will only get more challenging for “Dial of Destiny” in the coming weeks with a crowded July. “Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning Part I” opens on July 12, followed by “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” on July 21.

“The ups and downs at the box office are giving us whiplash,” Dergarabedian said. “And we’re still on the cusp of some of the biggest movies of the summer.”

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Entertainment

Can DC Blend Horror with a Superhero Movie? ‘Clayface’ Wants to Blur Genres

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Tom Rhys Harries in a scene from "Clayface." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)
This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Tom Rhys Harries in a scene from "Clayface." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)
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Can DC Blend Horror with a Superhero Movie? ‘Clayface’ Wants to Blur Genres

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Tom Rhys Harries in a scene from "Clayface." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)
This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Tom Rhys Harries in a scene from "Clayface." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

The dominant movie genres of the past decade, superhero films and horror, have usually stayed, like bashful teenagers on the dance floor, on separate sides of the multiplex.

But when James Gunn and Peter Safran were plotting the projects with which they wanted to launch their era of DC Studios, writer-director Mike Flanagan came in with a pitch that would fuse both genres.

Neither Safran nor Gunn were looking for a standalone movie about Clayface, a lesser-known villain from the Batman comics. But they were won over by Flanagan’s vision, which eventually became a script by Flanagan and Hossein Amini.

“It fit within the broader framework of how James and I saw the broad spectrum of film and television shows we want to make,” says Safran. “But it really was Mike Flanagan’s passion and pitch. You always look for volunteers and not recruits.”

Not many studios would push “Clayface” to the front of the pack, but Gunn, who started in horror, and Safran, who helped launch “The Conjuring” franchise, made “Clayface” — with James Watkins eventually coming on to direct — part of their first wave of DCU films, following “Superman” and “Supergirl.”

“Clayface” is a darker detour for DC. And, if it proves successful, it just might open up a darker frontier for comic book movies.

“From the get-go, this was not designed to be a traditional superhero movie,” Safran says. “It was always supposed to be a character-driven story that uses the DC mythology. If you took the DC elements out of it, it would just be a great horror movie.”

That makes “Clayface” something unusual in the normally calculated realm of superhero movies. It’s R-rated. It’s modestly budgeted at $40 million. And it stars the relatively unknown Tom Rhys Harries as a little-known DC villain.

“A lot of people wouldn’t necessarily know who Clayface is, but they wouldn’t need to,” says Watkins, the Welsh filmmaker of “Speak No Evil” and “The Woman in Black.” “It’s its own movie.”

‘Supergirl’ disappointment puts pressure on ‘Clayface’

That, Safran says, is by design. He and Gunn have emphasized filmmaker-first projects at DC, carving a more idiosyncratic, multi-genre path that has won them fans but also added some degree of risk.

“Clayface,” which opens in theaters Oct. 22, will debut shortly after Skydance and David Ellison’s takeover of Warner Bros. Ellison is keeping Gunn and Safran to lead DC, even though they’re coming off a misfire in the box-office disappointment of “Supergirl.” That puts more pressure on “Clayface” to perform.

“If you look at the cumulative choices that we’ve made, I think it’s pretty clear we’re trying to do things differently,” says Safran. “Not everything is going to work. The pressure we feel for ‘Clayface’ is honestly the pressure we feel for everything we put into the world.”

There have been a few movies to meld horror and superheroes together, including Wes Craven’s “Swamp Thing” (1982), Sam Raimi’s “Darkman” (1990) and “Brightburn” (2019), a sinister twist on the “Superman” origin story that Gunn produced.

But Clayface, a Batman villain created in 1940 by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, is still an unlikely character to put center stage. In the comics, he began as Basil Karlo, a B-list actor who, furious that he wasn’t cast in a horror remake he had previously starred in, wears the movie’s Clayface costume to kill the film's actors.

Winning over skeptical DC fans

Some fan skepticism has followed “Clayface.” Last week, Gunn defended the choice on the social media platform Threads after a user asked, “Who the (expletive) asked for a ‘Clayface’ movie?”

Gunn replied: “Although it may seem like it, Hollywood isn’t a place where the only way to make a movie is the public voting on what IP they want to see that they’ve seen countless times before.”

Watkins’ film, taking inspiration from the two-part episode “Feat of Clay” from “Batman: The Animated Series,” twists the original Clayface story slightly. Rising movie star Matt Hagen (Harries) is disfigured by a mob boss (Eddie Marsan) and rapidly falls out of Hollywood. After numerous unsuccessful surgeries, he resorts to an experimental process created by the scientist Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) that uses an untested, claylike living organism to rehabilitate his face.

“Part of the joy was being surprised at what’s looking back at me in the mirror every day,” says Harries, smiling.

To a large degree, “Clayface” progresses as a character study, one of an actor whose livelihood falls away from him and whose attempts to get back on the red carpet turn increasingly dark. His journey, though, hinges less on vanity than on his relationship with Caitlyn.

“I was approaching it the whole time like: Matt thinks he’s in a romantic comedy,” says Harries. “The fulcrum of the whole thing is his relationship with Caitlyn Corr. Without that, you don’t get the propulsion for Matt to be doing what he decides he needs to.”

Shape-shifting in genre and body

As “Clayface” devolves, Matt’s face and body increasingly shape-shift in chilling body horror transformations. That can include his own body changing or Matt taking the form of other characters around him. While CGI and visual effects were used, Watkins leaned into practical effects.

“I like horror when it’s most relatable, when it actually gets under the skin,” Watkins says.

In the third act of “Clayface,” that’s taken to body-changing extremes as Matt dons the appearance of those around him. Often, actors were swapping into scenes moment to moment with Harries.

“We’d often play a scene with Tom and then someone else would play the same scene,” says Watkins. “Sometimes Tom would copy them, sometimes they would copy Tom.”

If the superhero movie has sometimes been too rigidly formulaic, “Clayface” proves the genre has more elasticity than it's been shown to have. In “Clayface,” even the lead role was an ensemble piece.

“I won’t mention any actor’s name because it’s a bit of a spoiler,” Watkins says. “But one of the cast members was saying to me his son asked, ‘So who are you in the movie?’ And he said, ‘I’m Clayface.’”

Entertainment

Bollywood Actor Tiger Shroff Shot at in Mumbai, Three Suspects Held

Bollywood actor Tiger Shroff at the screening of 'Ikkis' in Mumbai in December 2025. Sujit JAISWAL / AFP/File
Bollywood actor Tiger Shroff at the screening of 'Ikkis' in Mumbai in December 2025. Sujit JAISWAL / AFP/File
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Bollywood Actor Tiger Shroff Shot at in Mumbai, Three Suspects Held

Bollywood actor Tiger Shroff at the screening of 'Ikkis' in Mumbai in December 2025. Sujit JAISWAL / AFP/File
Bollywood actor Tiger Shroff at the screening of 'Ikkis' in Mumbai in December 2025. Sujit JAISWAL / AFP/File

Indian actor Tiger Shroff was shot at in Mumbai on Sunday, police said, adding that three suspects have been detained.

Shooters opened fire at the 36-year-old actor as he was leaving a private event in the city's upscale Juhu area on Sunday evening, according to Police official Mohit Garg.

Aside from being India's financial capital, Mumbai is also the heart of Bollywood, the country's Hindi-language film industry, said AFP.

"Tiger Shroff is safe and Mumbai police has deployed different teams to investigate further," Garg told reporters.

Two people were injured in the incident, including the actor's driver, though Shroff did not sustain gunshot wounds, police said.

Three suspects have been rounded up in Rajasthan, another Indian state.

"Preliminary questioning revealed that two of them have one case each against them, one related to theft and the other under the Arms Act," police official Tejaswani Gautam told reporters.

Police have yet to establish a motive for the shooting.

Shroff is known for action films including the "Baaghi" franchise and "War".

Entertainment

Jesse Eisenberg, Julianne Moore Bring Curtain Down on London Film Festival with ‘The Debut’

US actors Jesse Eisenberg (L) and Julianne Moore (R) attend the premiere of "The Debut" and the closing night of the BFI London Film Festival 2026 in London, Britain, 18 October 2026. (EPA)
US actors Jesse Eisenberg (L) and Julianne Moore (R) attend the premiere of "The Debut" and the closing night of the BFI London Film Festival 2026 in London, Britain, 18 October 2026. (EPA)
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Jesse Eisenberg, Julianne Moore Bring Curtain Down on London Film Festival with ‘The Debut’

US actors Jesse Eisenberg (L) and Julianne Moore (R) attend the premiere of "The Debut" and the closing night of the BFI London Film Festival 2026 in London, Britain, 18 October 2026. (EPA)
US actors Jesse Eisenberg (L) and Julianne Moore (R) attend the premiere of "The Debut" and the closing night of the BFI London Film Festival 2026 in London, Britain, 18 October 2026. (EPA)

Actor-filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg said he wrote the lead role in his musical comedy "The Debut" with Julianne Moore in mind, praising the Oscar-winning star as "the greatest actress in the world" as the film closed the London Film Festival on Sunday.

"I just thought, this is Julianne Moore, and I will write every scene with her in mind and what she likes to do and what she's great at," Eisenberg, who wrote the screenplay and directed the film, told Reuters on the red carpet.

Moore stars as Mona, a shy New Jersey housewife who is thrilled ‌to land a ‌role in a community theater musical.

Drawn to the experience ‌by ⁠a longing for ⁠something missing in her life, Mona finds purpose and community through the show.

"She's moving towards something, knowing that there's something that she needs in her life," Moore said. "Then that thing leads you towards yourself and towards community, which is really the most valuable thing of all."

The film, which marks Eisenberg's latest directing effort following his BAFTA-winning screenplay for "A Real Pain", features seven original songs written by the filmmaker. The numbers appear in the fictional stage ⁠production "Nosy Neighbors", a deliberately light-hearted, 1990s-inspired musical performed by a cast ‌including "The Little Mermaid" star Halle Bailey.

"I love songwriting, I ‌love musical theater music and I wrote these songs in earnest," Eisenberg said.

Mona's early struggles ‌on stage test the patience of director Jerry, played by "The Holdovers" star Paul Giamatti, prompting ‌her to adopt an increasingly committed method acting approach.

Eisenberg said Moore's interpretation of Mona allowed him to make a "weird movie" that still felt grounded.

"She is so unusual, she's so strange," he said. "It allowed me to make a movie that wasn't realistic."

While Mona takes method acting to ‌extremes, the "Now You See Me" star said all actors, including himself, draw on some version of the technique.

"I always wind up ⁠feeling whatever the ⁠character feels," he said. "So if my character is miserable, I spend the shoot just miserable. But I don't realize it's for the character. I just think, 'Oh God, I must be doing terribly in the movie'."

Eisenberg, who plays a minor role in "The Debut", said the story was inspired by his own childhood experiences in community theater, where he discovered "a family and a home and a life" he liked.

Patrick Fabian, who plays Mona's husband in the film, said theater offers something increasingly rare: a chance for people to connect in person with one another.

"It brings people together, and these days, it gets them out of their screens and into the dark together to watch whatever is going on," Fabian said. "I think that's a real bonding thing."

"The Debut" brought the curtain down on the 70th London Film Festival, where Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa's "Imperium" won Best Film in the Official Competition.