The core problem in that question is "Indiana Jones fans."
Yes, well, that's true. But I should be clear that I'm including in that lot people who are casual fans all the way up to superfans. Casual audiences who just kinda generally like Indy may not really want to go on a journey into his twilight, ya know? It might make for a compelling story, but it's maybe not what audiences want when they sign up for an Indy flick.
What you're talking about here are the ways in which these films trip themselves when facing the goal of pleasing the not just people, but specifically the fandom, which should never be a priority in any case. If it were for the fans, Temple of Doom would have featured a Judeo-Christian artifact again, Nazis, some Middle Eastern location and a variety of other superficial elements as non-negotiable elements. The Last Crusade would have had to drop much of its comic relief. To this day, there are still die-hard fans of Raiders of the Lost Ark that don't like those two films because they don't feel enough like Raiders to them. It's just never enough for that kind of audience. You can make a film like Crusade, which is pretty reverential in its acknowledgement of the original movie, and still have people complaining that Marcus Brody is depicted as a buffoon—when in fact that character was barely developed in Raiders and most reasons we have to like him at all come from The Last Crusade and his friendship with Henry Sr.
Oh, I absolutely agree here. The hardcore fans are a group that are incredibly hard to please, not least in part because they are myopic in their fandom and in their sense of what they want. You need look no further than the boards here when people start pitching ideas for "Here's what the next film in XYZ franchise should be," and it's almost always "Another one, just like the other one, only different, but the same." People know what they've experienced, and know whether they like it, but that doesn't translate into knowing what makes for a good story.
But I do think that, at least with franchises, you can deviate too far from the established approach to the point where your audience -- not just the hardcore fans -- end up divided about it. TLJ is a good example. I LOVE that film. But it does certain things that
really pissed off a bunch of people in the audience, and then it
didn't do certain things that the general audience was expecting for a Star Wars film.
Rise of Skywalker is the polar opposite. It ticked all the boxes, and yet felt...kinda hollow. Like we were only doing this stuff to have "moments," or "beats," or "vibes," rather than an actual story. It gave audiences exactly what they wanted, and was utterly disposable as a result. There are vast chunks of that film I just...don't remember now. Stuff just happened, and it didn't really matter, and yay the good guys won. The end.
Now, are that kind of people a significant chunk of the audience and much of a determining factor when it comes to the creative success of these movies? Personally I don't think so. When a film is well made, it just resonates with people. Crystal Skull didn't get a bad rap because of Harrison Ford's age or the aliens, those are just surface elements folks cling to because they can't really articulate what didn't work with the film, which was largely the script. Mad Max: Fury Road completely displaced the character of Max yet it was universally loved, because it was a good movie. We could've had a fourth or fifth Indy movie featuring an old Ford just as good as the originals, you just need to find the right angle for it—which naturally can't be to simply regurgitate the trilogy. It can also still be—and should be—an action movie, you just have to adapt the story around the fact that Indiana got older. Henry Jones Sr. wasn't a thirtysomething in The Last Crusade yet there he was, directly at the center of tank, car, plane and motorbike chases. Stuff like that really isn't all that important here, nor the reason why sequels work or don't.
Yeah, I agree. The thing is, I think it's not just audiences but also executives who think they know what audiences want. In truth, I think most people in the audience are notoriously
bad at
explaining what they want. They focus on surface level issues like you say, without actually understanding what really made those details resonate for them, as opposed to some other hollow film where the details they want are there, but there's nothing behind them to give them any weight or substance.
