Top suspect in 2015 Ashley Madison hack committed suicide in 2014

1. It typically carves out new canon about its universe, and

2. Closes old loose ends

Canon when added haphazardly can:

A. retroactively create in-universe plot-holes (if X existed in the universe, then Y happening in the originals made no sense, they would have known about it),

B. remove magic and mystery from an existing universe (famously in Star Wars’ case, quite literally, because now “The Force” is a bunch of little biological creatures) or

C. otherwise trivialize what were previously key moments (someone who was portrayed as a big bad previously was later just shown to be some powerless, boring low-level lackey who was irrelevant)

Additionally, loose end patching is infectious to older entries of a story:

A. When an older work presents a mystery, when you have a solution in a later work and that solution is lame, it taints the original by the knowledge that the loose end is, forever after, a broken promise by the writers.

B. It typically crowds out the potential of better solutions later (typically in film, franchises have to reboot to backtrack on canon),

C. prevents the solution from being the potentially better “that’s just where the story ends, use your imagination for what happens next!”, and

D. makes it retroactively hard as a fan to justify recommending the series to new fans, because if they feel passionate too, you know there’s no light at the end of the tunnel for incoming fans, since you know how it ends and know that it’s not rewarding.

If you setup a Mary Sue that treats him like an useless geriatric waste of a man, and finish the movie by having this Mary Sue knock him out, you're basically pissing in your own franchise. And since Harrison Ford won't be able to do another one, this is how the franchise ended, with a sour note.

The Bond model is an interesting one, I wonder how well it would work for Indiana Jones. First I guess you gotta decide if you are gonna bring it forward in time or not. If you do, I think there's something of a bad guy problem. Raiders and Last Crusade both benefited a lot from the Nazis being on the other side of things. Keeping that scale + keeping the focus on archeological finds vs whatever Bond McGuffin can be imagined seems a hard job to me... And if you leave it set in the WWII era... there's only so much you can plow that land too.

And once you're 30 years after major media relevance, recasting your hero is a highly risky move. Does Indiana Jones without Harrison Ford have more pull? Or even less? (Compare to, say, Uncharted, which opened to less money than Dial of Destiny, but was cheaper to make at least).

(Of course, "highly risky move" also has to include spending $300M to make a new entry after that long... so... whoops again)

If you wanna say "don't make a movie about an old version of that character," fine. But give it a fucking break with the idea that the filmmakers are attacking you by showing that an 80 year old version of the character wouldn't be the same as a 40 year old version.

Let's remember that the last successful film in the franchise made EXCELLENT use of aging and the effect of that on the character's relationships with a great premise and execution by Ford and Connery, too. We were already getting to peek beyond just "here's Indy again doing Indy things"