In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones begins the opening jungle adventure in 1936.
The film opens in Peru, where Jones searches for a golden idol in an ancient temple filled with traps. The sequence establishes him as an archaeologist-adventurer before the story moves to his university work and the search for the Ark of the Covenant.
The 1936 setting is part of the film’s deliberate pulp-adventure style. It places the action before World War II, when Nazi interest in religious artifacts drives the main plot. The story later takes Jones to Nepal, Egypt, and the island of Patmos.
A common mix-up is confusing the opening year with the film’s release year. Raiders of the Lost Ark premiered in 1981, but its story begins decades earlier. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, released later, is actually set before Raiders, in 1935.