For skulduggery and sheer creepiness, few temples of doom hold a flickering torch to the Internet.

So when Indiana Jones charges back into theatres -- at a select few tonight at 12:01 a.m. and at the rest during the day tomorrow -- he'll do so after a year of tangling with a new species of snake, the kind that didn't exist 19 years ago with the pre-digital, pre-blog Last Crusade.

"Being able to spoil a movie or take frame grabs and be the first to post it -- I call it kind of stealing -- but it's a sport now," says Frank Marshall, longtime Steven Spielberg collaborator and producer of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

And it's a sport that's been at a fever pitch since Spielberg, star Harrison Ford and creator/executive-producer George Lucas announced they were dusting off their iconic franchise.

"I'd never had my production office broken into before," Marshall recalls not-so-fondly, referring to the theft last summer of more than 2,500 production photos, a 400-page production budget and other top-secret items. Eventually the culprit was turned in to authorities by web masters, after he tried to sell the stolen property to an online entertainment site. "The Internet responded to that in a great way."

Still the incident only underscored the need for iron-clad security. To prevent further leaks the production was sealed tighter than the Well of Souls.

"We were incredibly diligent," Marshall says. "We were way over the top. People were rolling their eyes at it, but we needed to do it."

Back in the 1980s, for example, copies of the script were commonplace on the set. But now when it takes only a few clicks of a mouse to transmit all 120-plus pages around the globe, the Kingdom of Crystal Skull screenplay was seen only by the eyes of a precious few.

"In the old days, every crew member would have a script they could read and take notes from. Now they have to rely on just a couple of us who had read the script. It makes it more difficult to get the work done. With the crew, the most important element is communication and being ahead of the game so that everyone is ready when Steven walks on the set ... But everyone understood this is the way it has to be."

And continues to be. When it came time to release the first preview, "just getting the trailer out there was a nightmare," Marshall says.

"But Steven wanted to make sure it was seen on the big screen, not on a phone or filmed by someone and put up on YouTube."

In the past, Spielberg and Lucas have both proven to be masters at marketing, often using secrecy (hard to believe no one knew what E.T. looked like until they paid for a ticket) to manipulate audience expectations. That much hasn't changed. Thus it was Spielberg who snapped the first photo of Ford in Jones regalia between takes of Crystal Skull. And for fans who wanted to see snippets of behind-the-scenes footage, video clips were posted at indianajones.com while Facebook groups and fan-boy websites fuelled the sequel's buzz.

Now, though, if the veil of secrecy hasn't been entirely lifted, it's been cracked. Last week saw the first trickle of anonymous reviews posted on one website (opinions ranged from mediocre to negative). And after the movie's premiere this past weekend at the Cannes film festival (as well as following critics' screenings across North America), reviews are inundating the Internet. More worrisome to the producers are the inevitable bootlegs being hawked by pirates.

"I just hope people resist that and go see the movie in the darkness of the movie theatre," Marshall says. "This is a big summer popcorn movie that should be seen with an audience."