Now all those dots on Harrison Ford’s face as seen on the set of the fifth Indiana Jones film make sense.

Fans connected the dots, speculating they were markers digital artists use to de-age actors — and now director James Mangold confirms his forthcoming movie will flash back to the past.

In a cover story for Empire, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker gives a nod to the original movies from the creator of the adventuring archeologist character, George Lucas, and the series’ former director, Steven Spielberg.

This comes in the form of a sequence centering on an Indy adventure that takes place between 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which was set in 1938, and 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which was set in the 1950s.

Mangold tells the magazine, “I wanted the chance to dive into this kind of full-on George-and-Steven old picture and give the audience an adrenaline blast. And then we fall out, and you find yourself in 1969. So that the audience doesn’t experience the change between the ’40s and ’60s as an intellectual conceit, but literally experiences the buccaneering spirit of those early days … and then the beginning of now.”

The “now” will see Ford, who will turn 81 when the film is released, on his final, still secret adventure as the man in the hat.

But as Indy said in Raiders of the Lost Ark, “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.”

The new movie hits theaters June 30, 2023, from Lucasfilm, which, like ABC News, is owned by parent company Disney.
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