It’s been three weeks since Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was finally released onto the 2023 movies calendar, with this marking the final time that Harrison Ford will wear the fedora and wield the whip. The fifth Indiana Jones movie has had a harder go theatrically compared to its predecessors, underwhelming at the box office and earning mixed critical reception. Now Lucasfilm, the production company behind Indiana Jones 5, has been hit with a lawsuit over the movie, and it’s for a weird reason.
As shared by THR, Frost River, a clothing company, has sued Lucasfilm for allegedly using its backpacks in The Dial of Destiny without permission, and then passing them off as coming from one of their competitors, Filson, for the marketing campaign by removing identifying marks. Indy specifically uses, as described in the article, “a bag with a knapsack design featuring a drawstring-topped main compartment with a flap cover.” The complaint claims that Lucasfilm and Filson are “two corporate juggernauts” that are “exploiting the hard work and intellectual property of Frost River, a small American company.” Devin McRae, a lawyer for Frost River, also wrote:
Lucasfilm and Filson produced a 60 second commercial prominently featuring video clips from the Indiana Jones 5 film intertwined with video clips of actors using Filson’s own products. Shockingly, one of the intertwined video clips was one from Indiana Jones 5 featuring Frost River’s Geologist Pack.
The complaints alleges that Frost River masquerading that bag as a Filson product is in violation of a federal trademark law called the Lanham Act. Neither Lucasfilm nor Filson immediately responded to THR’s request for comment, so now we’ll just have to wait and see what comes next for this lawsuit. Still, for a backpack of all things to be the reason why Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is at the center of a lawsuit is odd, though this is something that certainly warrants investigation if Frost River’s grievances have merit.
Still, regardless of where it comes from, an adventuring archaeologist like Indiana Jones needs a backpack in order to properly do his job. Those tools he uses to find ancient artifacts need to be stored somewhere, although the prizes around which his five film appearances revolve around obviously require more than his usual arsenal. For The Dial of Destiny, Indy and his goddaughter Helena, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, embarks to piece together the Antikythera, a mechanism created by Archimedes that, as they later learn, is capable of opening a portal to the past, albeit only one specific time period. You can learn more about that in our Dial of Destiny ending breakdown.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’s theatrical run continues, but just like its four predecessors did earlier this year, it will likely become available to stream with a Disney+ subscription. Although this is Harrison Ford’s last Indiana Jones movie, he won’t be venturing away from Disney, as he’s next playing Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross in Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts, with both these both upcoming Marvel movies arriving next year.
