There are movie moments you can recognise before a single line of dialogue is spoken.

A fedora. A whip. A giant stone boulder rolling towards the camera.

And from Friday 11 September 2026, audiences around the UK have another chance to experience them where they were always meant to be seen: on the cinema screen.

Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark is returning to UK cinemas for its 45th anniversary, with the 1981 adventure returning to the big screen for a new generation — and plenty of us who need very little excuse to see Indy again.

Released in 1981, Raiders introduced cinema audiences to Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones: an archaeology professor whose working day tended to involve rather more booby traps, Nazis and supernatural artefacts than most university employment contracts probably allowed for.

What is remarkable 45 years later is how little Raiders feels like a museum piece. Modern blockbuster cinema owes an enormous debt to it. The opening temple sequence alone established a visual vocabulary borrowed, parodied and referenced across film, television, gaming, LEGO, toys and theme-park culture ever since.

For collectors, Indiana Jones exists far beyond the films themselves. Decades of action figures, LEGO sets, posters, VHS releases, comics, books, trading cards, replicas and promotional material have turned Indy into a collecting category in his own right. Search a Comic-Con trader hall and you are never too far away from a fedora, an Indy figure or somebody insisting they have finally found the poster they have been chasing for twenty years.

For one northern collector, Indy meant rather more

Here at ASACC, this particular anniversary feels a little different.

Earlier this year we lost our friend Paddy O’Hare — musician, filmmaker, collector, convention regular and quite possibly the biggest Indiana Jones fan in the North.

For Paddy, Harrison Ford wasn’t simply a favourite actor. He was an inspiration.

Paddy’s story with Ford began as a child. Raiders of the Lost Ark helped spark a fascination that stayed with him throughout his life. Long before being a geek became something celebrated in mainstream culture, Paddy was collecting, attending film fairs and immersing himself in the worlds and people behind the films he loved.

Years later, Paddy turned that lifelong fascination into something considerably more ambitious.

Finding Ford was Paddy’s documentary journey in search of the man behind his hero — speaking to actors, filmmakers, crew members and others connected to Harrison Ford’s extraordinary career and collecting their stories along the way.

That journey became an adventure of its own, taking Paddy through conventions, interviews and encounters with people from the worlds he had loved since childhood.

Sadly, he didn’t get the opportunity to finish that adventure himself.

But Finding Ford remains unfinished rather than forgotten.

So when that famous hat and whip return to cinema screens, there will be plenty of people celebrating 45 years of one of the greatest adventure films ever made.

For some of us, though, there’ll be somebody missing from the audience.

This one’s for you, Paddy.

May The Ford Be With You.

ASACC verdict

See it on the big screen. Then try to resist looking for Indiana Jones collectibles afterwards. We give you until the foyer.

Raiders of the Lost Ark returns to UK cinemas from 11 September 2026.