JuicyTalk
Indiana Jones has been around for more than 40 years, and Hollywood still hasn’t found anyone who can quite take his place. That hasn’t stopped plenty of movies from trying. Since Raiders of the Lost Ark arrived in 1981, there has been a steady stream of treasure hunters, archaeologists, explorers, and ordinary people getting pulled into adventures involving lost cities, ancient artifacts, hidden clues, and more than a few deadly traps.
It is easy to see why. Indiana Jones movies make archaeology look like the most exciting job imaginable. Indy can spend one minute figuring out where an artifact has been hidden for centuries and the next running for his life because finding it was apparently the easy part. He travels the world, gets himself into increasingly ridiculous situations, and usually takes quite a beating along the way. Harrison Ford also gives Indy enough humor and personality that the movies never become too serious about any of it.
Many movies went after some version of that experience. That doesn’t mean they were literally made to replace Indiana Jones or that every hero is just Indy with a different name. Some lean harder into comedy, fantasy, video games, or romance. What connects them is the attempt to give audiences another big adventure built around discovery, danger, and a hero worth following on the next hunt. In several cases, that next adventure actually happened. In others, Hollywood’s search for its next Indiana Jones continued.
10
The Mummy (1999)
The Mummy came pretty close to giving audiences another adventure series to get excited about. Rick O’Connell isn’t an archaeologist like Indy, but he doesn’t need to be because Evelyn Carnahan handles that side of the story. She knows the history and can translate ancient texts, while Rick is much better at shooting his way out of whatever trouble they find. Their search for Hamunaptra brings both sides together with a lost city, buried treasure, and rival explorers.
Waking Imhotep also takes the movie much further into the supernatural than Indiana Jones usually goes. Rick and Evelyn aren’t only searching ruins once he is loose. They are dealing with plagues, scarabs, sandstorms, and a mummy slowly rebuilding his body. Fraser and Rachel Weisz also give the movie plenty of personality, especially as Rick and Evelyn go from constantly irritating each other to falling for each other.
Audiences got to see their relationship continue in The Mummy Returns two years later, turning their first trip to Hamunaptra into the beginning of a larger Mummy series.
9
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
By the time Lara Croft: Tomb Raider arrived in 2001, Lara Croft was already doing plenty of things that invited comparisons to Indiana Jones. She raided tombs, searched for ancient artifacts, solved puzzles, and traveled to places most people would probably know better than to enter. The movie didn’t have to invent a new treasure hunter. It just had to figure out whether Lara could make the jump from video games to the kind of adventure Indy had dominated on the big screen.
Jolie plays Lara with that confidence from the beginning, which helps her feel different from the character Ford had already made famous. She got another chance at it two years later when The Cradle of Life sent Lara after another legendary artifact.
8
The Librarian: Quest for the Spear (2004)
The Librarian: Quest for the Spear gives Flynn Carsen the academic background of Indiana Jones without any of the experience that would actually help him survive an Indiana Jones movie. Flynn has 22 academic degrees and has spent most of his adult life in college. Then he becomes the Librarian, which sounds harmless until he learns that the library secretly stores objects like Excalibur and Pandora’s Box. His first assignment comes when thieves steal one piece of the Spear of Destiny.
Flynn’s search takes him from New York to the Amazon and eventually to Shangri-La. He has to translate the Language of the Birds, follow clues left behind by previous Librarians, get through a Mayan temple filled with traps, and find the other pieces of the Spear before the Serpent Brotherhood does.
The character caught on, with Wyle returning for two more movies before the story expanded into The Librarians.
7
Sahara (2005)
Sahara had an entire series of Clive Cussler novels to draw from, with Matthew McConaughey taking on the role of Dirk Pitt, an explorer who works for the National Underwater and Marine Agency. Much like Indiana Jones, Dirk has a habit of pursuing historical mysteries that sound completely ridiculous until he starts finding evidence. In Sahara, he’s convinced that a Confederate ironclad carrying a fortune in gold somehow ended up in West Africa, and he’s determined to find it.
His search takes him and his best friend Al Giordino deep into Mali, where they become involved in a doctor’s investigation into a mysterious disease and uncover a toxic waste operation. McConaughey’s Dirk is more of a laid-back adventurer than Indy, but he’s just as willing to risk his life chasing a historical discovery. The desert chases, gunfights, buried treasure, and increasingly improbable escapes certainly make the comparison easy.
With more than a dozen Dirk Pitt novels already published, Sahara had plenty of material for a new adventure franchise, but its disappointing box office performance meant McConaughey never got another outing.
6
National Treasure (2004)
National Treasure found a clever way to make an Indiana Jones-style adventure out of places millions of Americans already knew. Benjamin Franklin Gates doesn’t need to uncover a temple on the other side of the world. His search for a treasure hidden by the Founding Fathers leads him to the Declaration of Independence, Independence Hall, Trinity Church, and clues buried throughout American history. Of course, it also leads to Ben stealing the Declaration when rival treasure hunter Ian Howe threatens to get there first.
Ben is much more comfortable solving a centuries-old riddle than throwing a punch, which gives Nicolas Cage a different kind of adventurer to play. He deciphers invisible messages, connects historical clues, finds hidden passages, and stays one step ahead of another group searching for the same prize.
Three years later, National Treasure: Book of Secrets pulled Ben into another historical mystery, this time involving John Wilkes Booth’s diary, the President’s secret book, and the lost city of Cíbola.
5
The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
With Steven Spielberg directing, The Adventures of Tintin was always going to invite comparisons to Indiana Jones. Tintin isn’t searching for an archaeological artifact, though. His adventure begins when he buys a model of the Unicorn, a 17th-century ship that sank while carrying a fortune. A tiny scroll hidden inside its mast reveals that two matching models exist, and finding all three scrolls could reveal where the treasure went down.
Tintin is a reporter, so curiosity does most of the work that archaeology does for Indy. He follows the story from his home in Brussels onto a cargo ship, survives a plane crash in the Sahara, and reaches the fictional Moroccan city of Bagghar with Captain Haddock. Tintin was also an easy character to imagine sending somewhere else next. Hergé had already written decades of adventures for him, and the movie ends with Tintin and Haddock discovering another clue that points toward more of the Unicorn’s treasure.
4
The Rundown (2003)
Beck isn’t looking for treasure when he arrives in Brazil in The Rundown. He isn’t looking for adventure, either. Dwayne Johnson’s bounty hunter has been sent to bring Travis Walker home, but Travis refuses to go because he believes he has finally found El Gato do Diabo, a legendary golden artifact hidden in the jungle. Making matters worse, local mine owner Cornelius Hatcher wants El Gato for himself and has no intention of letting either man leave with it.
There are gunfights, rebels, dangerous terrain, and a race to keep the treasure away from Hatcher. Beck just happens to approach all of it as a bounty hunter instead of an archaeologist. The Rundown never got a sequel, leaving what could have been Johnson’s first recurring adventure hero as a one-off.
3
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time replaces the archaeologist with a prince who can barely go a few minutes without jumping off something. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Dastan gets pulled into the adventure after taking a mysterious dagger during the Persian army’s attack on Alamut. He soon discovers that pressing the jewel in its handle releases magical sand and sends its holder back in time. Princess Tamina knows there is much more at stake, especially if someone reaches the enormous supply of sand hidden beneath her city.
Dastan runs along walls, leaps between rooftops, swings from beams, and throws himself off buildings with the confidence of someone who knows exactly how far he can jump. Those moves came straight from the Prince of Persia games and gave the movie an action style of its own. There were plenty more games and stories Disney could have pulled from, but the planned franchise never materialized. The Sands of Time remains Dastan’s only movie.
2
Uncharted (2022)
Nathan Drake was getting compared to Indiana Jones years before Tom Holland ever played him. The Uncharted games had already made Nate a globe-trotting treasure hunter, but the 2022 movie catches him before any of that. He’s still tending bar and pickpocketing customers when Sully approaches him about finding the fortune lost during Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition. Nate agrees partly because Sully knew his missing brother Sam, who had been searching for the same treasure.
The hunt takes Nate from an auction in New York to Barcelona and eventually the Philippines. He and Sully steal one of two jeweled crosses that work as keys, uncover a hidden passage beneath a church, and follow the trail to two of Magellan’s ships concealed inside a cave. Nate also gets thrown out of a cargo plane and later fights aboard one of those ships while helicopters carry it through the air. It’s history and treasure hunting pushed to ridiculous blockbuster extremes.
1
The Lost City (2022)
Loretta Sage also isn’t trying to become a treasure hunter in The Lost City. She left archaeology behind years ago and now uses that background to write romance novels about fictional adventures. Then billionaire Abigail Fairfax kidnaps her because the expertise she thought she had left in the past is exactly what he needs.
Loretta can decipher the clues, but getting to the tomb is another matter. The ancient inscription, lost treasure, remote ruins, and rival racing them to the same prize all put the movie close to Indiana Jones, while Loretta and Alan are deliberately less capable adventurers.
Unlike Uncharted or The Mummy, though, The Lost City doesn’t spend much time setting up their next hunt. It takes the kind of adventure Indiana Jones made famous and treats surviving one as enough.
