Leading up to the release of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a lot of fans were wondering how the story would address Shia LaBeouf’s character Mutt, the son of Indiana and Marion. The movie definitely does address him and in a way he plays a key part in Jones’s story. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, you might want to skip this!
Mutt ended up being killed off as he joined the military and was killed in action. The decision to kill Mutt off was not because of the things he said about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or what he said about Spielberg, but that didn’t help. Director James Mangold just wanted to take things in a different direction.
In case you don’t remember what LaBeouf said, a couple of years after Crystal Skull came out he told the LA Times that the movie “dropped the ball” and that “there was a reason it wasn’t universally accepted.” Then in 2016, LaBeouf told Variety, “I don’t like the movies that I made with Spielberg,” and added that he found working with the filmmaker to be disillusioning, saying, “He’s less a director than he is a f**king company.” Harrison Ford called him an idiot for saying those things.
Anyway, when talking about Mutt’s fate in an interview with Variety, Mangold explained:
“It’s separate from all past studio, political intrigue on movies I didn’t make. You were either going to make a movie all about the two of them or you’re going to have to find a way to not have [Mutt] around, because he was too significant a player in the previous film to just pretend he didn’t exist. I didn’t think his whole thing worked that well in the previous film. I just went towards something else because it was what was more interesting to me.”
I do think that Mutt could’ve worked out a lot better had the creative team made better story decisions. Regardless, Mangold wanted to explore what it meant for Indy to look back on a lifetime of regret and loss and find himself ready to disappear into history.
In the movie, we learn that Indiana and Marion separated after the death of Mutt, and Indy regrets not trying harder to keep him from joining the military. There’s a who emotional storyline there that drives Indy’s motivations.
I like how they handled the whole thing. Let’s be honest, not a lot of Indiana Jones fans wanted to see Mutt again, but he was addressed in a way that made sense for the story.