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Raiders of the Lost Ark is a great landmark of modern cinema directed by Steven Spielberg from a story by George Lucas. A tribute to the adventure serials of the 1930s and 1940s, Raiders of the Lost Arkwas greatly influenced by what had come before in blockbuster movie cinema and would go on to influence action adventure film and TV that would come after.
We could spend an entire book outlining the ways in which the Indiana Jonesfranchise not only changed action cinema, but continues to influence contemporary pop culture to this day. Instead, let's honor the film's anniversary (happy 37th birthday, Raiders!) by looking at how Raiders of the Lost Arkhas specifically influenced three of the most important TV and film franchises of the last decade: Captain America, The X-Files, and X-Men...
Captain America: The First Avenger
Has there even been a more successful Indiana Jones-style blockbuster (that isn't Indiana Jones) than Captain America: The First Avenger?Like Raiders of the Lost Ark,The First Avenger lives and breathes nostalgia. They're both period dramas featuring action heroes who fight the Nazis. They even have nearly identical-dressed secondary antagonists in Toby Jones' Dr. Arnim Zola and Ronald Lacey's Major Arnold Ernst Toht.
Of course, these similarities aren't a coincidence. The First Avengerdirector Joe Johnston spoke to the L.A. Times about the extent to which Indiana Jonesinfluenced The First Avenger, saying:
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We used Raiders as a template when we were developing the story, but we sort of moved away from it as time went on. This is futurism in the 1940s. If you went to 1942 and thought of what the future would be, that’s what the approach was ... So we went away from the Raiders template in that sense but where we...