All 5 Indiana Jones Movies Ranked From Worst to Best

Tim Molloy
.May 16, 2025

The best Indiana Jones movie is one of the best movies ever made. The worst should probably not have been made at all.

While George Lucas is best known as the creator of Star Wars, he also created Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones, the academic archaeologist and part-time adventurer who spends his life traveling the globe in search of artifacts that belong in a museum.

He's tough, he's cantankerous, he's whip smart — and he's smart with a whip. Played by Harrison Ford (and River Phoenix, for a few minutes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), he may be the greatest action-adventure star Hollywood has ever produced.

In a gift from the movie gods, Lucas paired up with his good friend Steven Spielberg on the franchise, with Spielberg directing all but one of the Indiana Jones movies. When they're good, they're great. When they're not, well... they make the others look even greater.

Here are our ranking of all five Indiana Jones movies, from worst to best.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Just to be clear, we love Indiana Jones movies — in fact, we love them so much that we wish they'd stopped at three. Spielberg didn't direct 2023's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but we imagine it would have been only slightly better if he had.

James Mangold, a top-tier director whose films include Logan and Walk the Line, took over for Spielberg, who only executive produced this one.

The problem with this film was just time, which comes for us all. Harrison Ford — one of the all-time best actors and movie stars — was pushing 80 during the production.

One of the charms of Indiana Jones movies is that he's always the underdog, getting beaten and battered while hilariously outnumbered. But Dial of Destiny just asked for too much suspension of disbelief, especially during an ill-advised CGI-heavy opening with Ford de-aged by decades (above).

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was the lowest-grossing Indiana Jones movie, earning about $384 million on a massive budget — Forbes estimated that it lost more than $100 million.

We also felt like the ending was just too much. This unfortunately made our list of sequels nobody needs to see.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

This movie is fine, but we expect from Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones should mean soaring highs, seemingly effortless deadpan humor, and introductions to fascinating mythologies, heavily tweaked for multiplex (or better yet, drive-in) consumption.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had a cool setting — we loved the homage to 1950s sci-fi movies and atomic age B films, best epitomized by the so-silly-it's-great scene in which a refrigerator helps Indy survive an atomic bomb.

We also like the cast. Cate Blanchett had the thankless task of being the main baddie, a KGB agent competing with Indy to get a telepathic crystal skull, located somewhere in Peru — a nice callback to the Peru-set first scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Harrison Ford was in fine form, and we were thrilled at the return of Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood. Shia LaBeouf was acceptable as Mutt Williams, though we wish he'd never joined the franchise at all given his grim outcome, revealed in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. And we liked the film's flirtation with handing the whole Indy legacy over to Mutt — before Indy himself nullifies that notion.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

As we mentioned above, we wish this film really had been the last crusade — the Indy franchise could have been a magnificent trilogy.

After a wild departure in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Last Crusade brought the franchise back to its core mission: Indiana Jones punching Nazis. We love it, and the addition of Sean Connery as Indy's dad, Henry, ratcheted things up to instant classic level.

Twists and surprises abound, and the conclusion — Indiana solving a series of deadly puzzles to find the Holy Grail — was masterful, and allowed the audience to play along instead of just watching Indy jump, roll, and crack his whip.

We absolutely love this movie, and the remaining two movies on our list.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

That's right: We think Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is better than Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We love them both, mind you, but have a feeling a lot of people will grouse over our choice here, so let us explain.

More than almost any other movie ever, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a thrill ride from start to finish. Even when it lets up for a little bit of exposition in the dinner scene, there's some classic Indiana Jones movie distraction — namely the hideous food served at Pankot Palace.

That scene has drawn some criticism for suggesting that the people of fictional Pankot — and by extension, people who look like them — are in some way backward. But consider, if you will, the possibility that the savvy people of the palace are in fact messing with their Western guests and their cultural biases. It gives the movie another layer of fun.

The PG-rated movie was so scary it helped inspire the PG-13 rating, and even Raiders screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan found it to be excessive, once calling the film "very ugly and mean-spirited."

Oh well. We're with Quentin Tarantino on loving Temple of Doom. He calls it his favorite Steven Spielberg film, along with Jaws.

And that climactic Temple of Doom bridge sequence, above? Incredibly good.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Again, this is one of the best movies ever made — a classic that never gets old. In fact, its adherence to the adventuring serials of the 1930s and '40s made it feel steeped in film history from the start, giving it a mix of kitsch and Golden Age Hollywood charm that no other movie has ever replicated.

It breaks rules from the beginning — for the first few minutes, you might think Alfred Molina is the star of the film — and the romance between Indy and Marion is convincing, entrancing, and very easy to root for.

The action sequences are as good as those in any movie, especially when you consider that in 1981, all the effects were practical — but the coolest fight in the movie is the one Indy avoids by simply shooting a master swordsman.

The film also has a wonderful exploration of science versus faith, and has, for our money, maybe the best ending of any movie. The fate of the Ark is dry, understated, and a great joke about government bureaucracy.