Did Paramount Bury 'Nate and Hayes' to Protect 'Indiana Jones?'

The 1983 Adventure Paramount Didn’t Want You to See

In November 1983, Paramount Pictures released an old-fashioned pirate adventure called Nate and Hayes (also known as Savage Islands) on 1,200 screens.

It should have been a hit. It had:

• Tommy Lee Jones as a roguish pirate

• A South Pacific setting

• Rope-bridge standoffs

• Human sacrifice sequences

And yet, the movie made just $1.9 million, became a punchline on Siskel & Ebert, and vanished.

For decades, a rumor has followed it around:

Did Paramount bury the movie because it was too close to Indiana Jones?

There are no executive memos or diary entries that prove it. But the circumstantial evidence is juicy, and the timing is fascinating.

Bully Hayes, Missionaries, and Cannibals: What Nate and Hayes Is About

The film is a light, breezy swashbuckler directed by Ferdinand Fairfax, co-written by an early-career John Hughes (yes, that John Hughes) and David Odell.

The story follows:

• Captain Bully Hayes (Tommy Lee Jones) – a charming rogue

• Nathaniel Williamson (Michael O’Keefe) – a stiff missionary

• Sophie (Jenny Seagrove) – Nate’s fiancée, kidnapped by a slave trader

The unlikely duo must rescue Sophie across the late-19th-century South Pacific — a mix of pirate fights, jungle escapes, and island rituals.

It’s an Errol Flynn-style romp shot in Fiji and New Zealand for NZ$7.5–13 million, financed mostly by New Zealand banks.

Paramount’s “Negative Pickup” Deal — and Why It Matters

Paramount didn’t pay to make the movie. They bought it via a negative pickup, meaning:

• The film was already finished

• Paramount just had to market and distribute it

• They had no financial skin in the game

If the movie failed?

No big deal.

But Paramount had something very big coming down the pipeline…

The Indiana Jones Shadow

Nate and Hayes opened six months before:

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

(May 1984)

Both were Paramount releases, both were adventure films, and both featured:

• Rope bridges that collapse

• Jungle chases

• Human sacrifice sequences

• White-clad damsels in peril

• Snappy rogue heroes

Critics noticed.

A 2011 review called the similarities:

“positively eerie.”

The film historian Glenn Erickson recently put it bluntly:

“Nate & Hayes was all but shelved by Paramount… back-burnered so as not to interfere with the rollout of Spielberg’s Indiana Jones movies.”

That matches the long-circulating rumor:

Why market your B-level pirate adventure when you have a billion-dollar franchise to protect?

Siskel & Ebert Torched It

If Paramount didn’t bury the movie, the critics did.

On a November 1983 episode of Siskel & Ebert, they called it:

• Loud

• Dumb

• One of the worst films of the year

Roger Ebert took to print and asked why this film even existed.

Gene Siskel added the death blow: not charming.

When they later appeared on David Letterman, they cited Nate and Hayes as a “bad recent film,” amplifying the nasty word-of-mouth.

The Lost Adventure Finds a Cult Audience

The film lived on through:

• Cable reruns

• VHS rentals

• And now, a 4K Blu-ray from Kino Lorber

In 2025, Trailers From Hell praised it as:

“Cute, fast and familiar… underrated.”

Tommy Lee Jones is fun, grinning through cannibal islands and gunboat raids like he’s already practicing for The Fugitive.

There’s a pirate-movie innocence that predates the blockbuster cynicism we have now.

It’s not Raiders…

but it doesn’t have to be.

So Did Paramount Bury It?

The truth:

There is no smoking-gun memo.

But the theory has:

• Logical timing

• Visual overlaps

• Market-protection motives

• Film-historian backing

Paramount had everything to gain by focusing on Temple of Doom and nothing to gain by promoting a New Zealand-financed pirate romp.

It’s a classic Hollywood story:

Protect the tentpole.

Ignore the orphan.

Final Verdict: A Fun, Forgotten 80s Adventure

If you love:

• Rope bridges

• Jungle temples

• Swashbuckling heroes

• Tommy Lee Jones glowering at the Pacific

…this is movie comfort food.

It’s short, silly, and full of energy — a time capsule from the moment when every studio wanted its own Raiders.

Fun pulp. Terrible marketing. Worth rediscovering.

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