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The biggest change to the Indiana Jones franchise with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull isn’t the addition of Mutt to the script. It isn’t the weird CGI monkeys or that a major plot point seems to be psychic skulls. No, Indiana Jones 4 makes a sudden and awkward leap into sci-fi by centering the action on aliens rather than religious relics. And it turns out that everyone, from Harrison Ford to Steven Spielberg, hated the aliens in Indiana Jones, but George Lucas is the one who insisted on it.

In a long retrospective of Steven Spielberg’s career, George Lucas talked about the much-maligned aliens that show up at the end of Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. They happened primarily because Lucas wanted a 1950s sci-fi vibe for the movie, even though both the director and star hated the idea.

“I wanted it to be kind of a War of the Worlds sort of thing,” George Lucas explained. “Harrison [Ford] said, ‘I’m not going to do another science-fiction movie.’ And Steven [Spielberg] said, ‘I’m not going to do another science-fiction movie.’ I said, ‘Steven, this is perfect because it’s the 1950s, when flying saucers were a whole thing,’ but he said ‘No.’ We did about five scripts, and finally Steve and I compromised: ‘Look, what if they’re not aliens but from another dimension.’”

The result, however, wasn’t what either Harrison Ford or Steven Spielberg had in mind. “Steven put that last shot in, where they get into a flying saucer and take off,” George Lucas continued. “He was rationalizing it by saying, ‘Well, they’re going to another dimension. They have to get there somehow.’ I said, ‘It looks like a flying saucer.’ He did make a science-fiction movie after that, and Harrison did an alien movie.”

Perhaps most interestingly, Kathleen Kennedy - who produced the movie - suggested that unhappiness over Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was behind the desire to make one more Indiana Jones movie, even without Spielberg's direction.

Noting that neither Spielberg nor Ford were "100% on board" Lucas's ideas for Crystal Skull, Kennedy argued, "That’s why the movie, out of the four that Steven made, is the weakest. And that’s why Harrison was so deeply committed to [2023's Indiana Jones and the Dial of] Destiny. He didn’t want [Kingdom of the Crystal Skull] to be the end."

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