Indiana Jones Timeline: Every Film by Story Year

The five Indiana Jones films cover the story years 1912, 1935, 1936, 1938, 1944, 1957 and 1969, and only one of them is told out of order: Temple of Doom is a prequel. Every film is directed by Steven Spielberg except Dial of Destiny, which was directed by James Mangold.

The sequence in which to sit down and watch them is a separate question, and the Indiana Jones movies in order guide handles it. The story calendar below follows the years each adventure happens in, what Indy is chasing, and how the decades connect. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (a TV series) and games such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle sit outside the five films, so every year here comes from the films alone. For the full list of films, see the Indiana Jones movies hub.

Think of it like the dates on a family photo album. The photos were not taken in the order they were printed, but once you read the dates on the back, the whole life makes sense.

The earliest year on the Indiana Jones calendar is 1912, the opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), directed by Steven Spielberg. River Phoenix plays the teenage Indy, a Boy Scout who spots grave robbers carrying Coronado's cross, snatches it and runs, first on horseback and then through the cars of a circus train.

The leader of the robbers lets him keep a fedora, so the hat that defines the character is handed over by the very men chasing him. That small gift also sets up the cross, which the adult Indy recovers in 1938.

Apart from this prologue, the five films never show Indy as a child, and the rest of the calendar follows him as an adult. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles is a separate TV series and sits outside the five films.

Temple of Doom (1984), directed by Steven Spielberg, is set in 1935, which makes it the earliest adventure of Indy's adult career and a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark. It is set a year before Raiders.

The film opens in Shanghai with a failed deal with the crime boss Lao Che. Indy escapes with the singer Willie Scott and the boy Short Round, and the trio ends up on a plane that belongs to Lao Che. The pilots bail out, and the three leave the plane in an inflatable raft that carries them down a mountain and into a river in India.

They reach the village of Mayapore, where the villagers say their sacred stone is gone and their children have been taken. Indy agrees to help, partly because of his interest in the fabled Sankara stones, and the trail leads to Pankot Palace. The film ends with Indy defeating the priest Mola Ram on a broken rope bridge and British Indian Army troops arriving. Indy returns the stone and the children to Mayapore. Because it is a prequel, the ending does not set up a direct sequel.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), directed by Steven Spielberg, takes place in 1936, which answers the common question of what year Indiana Jones 1 happened. It was the first film released but is second in story order. It opens with Indy escaping a deadly temple in Peru, only for his rival Belloq to take the golden idol he recovered.

Back home, Army intelligence tells him the Nazis are digging in Egypt for the Ark of the Covenant. Indy needs a headpiece that his former love Marion Ravenwood owns in Nepal, so he goes to find her. The search continues in Cairo, where he joins his friend Sallah, and moves on to the Well of Souls, a chamber of snakes.

The Nazis seal Indy and Marion in the chamber, they escape, and Indy chases the Ark through a truck convoy and onto a ship. He rides a German submarine to a remote island, where Belloq plans a ceremony to open the Ark. Indy tells Marion to close her eyes, and the spirits that pour out kill Belloq and the Nazis. In Washington, the government crates the Ark and stores it in a huge warehouse, where it is lost among countless other boxes.

The main story of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade takes place in 1938, two years after Raiders. It begins when Indy takes Coronado's cross from a collector off the Portuguese coast, and then he hears that his father Henry, a Grail scholar, has gone missing.

Walter Donovan, the backer of Henry's search, asks Indy to pick it up. With Marcus Brody he heads to Venice, where Dr. Elsa Schneider helps him follow a clue hidden in a catacomb beneath a library. A secret brotherhood attacks, and the trail leads to a castle where Henry is held. Elsa is secretly working for the Nazis.

Indy recovers the diary at a Berlin rally, and father and son flee by zeppelin and then by plane. The diary's map takes the Nazis to Hatay, where Indy wrecks their convoy and a tank goes over a cliff. Inside the Grail temple, Donovan shoots Henry so that Indy will face the traps. Donovan chooses the wrong cup and ages to death, Indy chooses the true Grail and heals Henry, and Elsa falls reaching for the cup. Henry, Indy, Marcus and Sallah ride off together, closing the original trilogy.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), directed by Steven Spielberg, is set in 1957, nineteen years after Last Crusade. Soviet agents under Colonel Irina Spalko seize Indy and his partner Mac in the Nevada desert and make Indy help them find a mummified alien at a secret government site.

Mac turns on Indy, who survives an atomic test blast by sheltering in a refrigerator lined with lead. Indy is then put on leave from Marshall College, and a young man named Mutt Williams asks for his help in finding Harold Oxley, who vanished in Peru while searching for a crystal skull.

The chase ends at Akator, where thirteen interdimensional beings are connected to the skull, and Spalko is destroyed by the knowledge they give her. Indy reunites with Marion Ravenwood, who tells him that Mutt is his son. Indy is reinstated at Marshall College, promoted to associate dean, and the film closes on his wedding to Marion.

The last stretch of the story calendar belongs to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), directed by James Mangold, and it is the only film that splits its action across two separate years, 1944 and 1969. The 1944 section is a wartime prologue on a Nazi train loaded with stolen treasures, where Indy and Basil Shaw are prisoners. Jürgen Voller walks away with half of the Antikythera dial, a device tied to Archimedes, and Indy keeps the other half.

Twenty-five years later the calendar lands in New York, and Indy is a professor at Hunter College with retirement close. Basil's daughter Helena Shaw, his goddaughter, arrives hunting for the dial, and Voller is chasing it as well while working for NASA. The pursuit runs from New York to Tangier and Greece, with a young helper named Teddy joining along the way.

The film then breaks its own calendar. Voller hopes to reach 1939 and alter the war, but his plane crosses a time fissure and ends up in 212 BC, at the Siege of Syracuse. Indy is thrilled to meet Archimedes and would happily stay. Helena knocks him out and hauls him home to 1969, where he recovers in New York and patches things up with his estranged wife Marion.

That makes 212 BC the single furthest-back date any of the five films reaches. The film was billed as Harrison Ford's last outing as Indy, and as of November 3, 2026, no sixth film has been announced (see Indiana Jones 6).

The Indiana Jones timeline is easiest to read as five adventures separated by uneven gaps: one year between Temple of Doom and Raiders, two between Raiders and Last Crusade, nineteen to Crystal Skull, then another twelve to the main story of Dial of Destiny. In my opinion, that spacing explains why the first three films feel like one run and the last two feel like reunions.

The prequel choice is the most interesting call. Placing Temple of Doom in 1935 means Willie Scott and Short Round come before Marion Ravenwood in the story but after her in theaters. As such, when Marion returns in Crystal Skull, she meets an Indy who has already lived through a Shanghai nightclub, an Indian mine and a Nazi submarine. It could be argued that this is why the Marion reunion carries weight: it calls back to Raiders, not to the film immediately before it in story order.

There is also a World War II thread. Last Crusade (1938) puts Indy against the Nazis again, and Dial of Destiny opens with him back among them in 1944, a prologue that reminds you he has fought them before. Paradoxically, the film that jumps furthest back in time, to 212 BC, is the one most about letting the past go.

If you are trying to decide how to watch, my advice is to go by release date for a first viewing and by story year for a rewatch. The Indiana Jones movies in order guide lays out both, and the Indiana Jones movies ranked list shows where each film lands once you have seen them. For the money side, the Indiana Jones box office page has every budget and gross.