Depending on which metric you use (and whether you account for inflation) Samuel L. Jackson is either the highest or second-highest grossing movie star alive today. But while Jackson’s cameo in “Iron Man” is bound to help the cause, his main competition is about to get a pretty assured bump of his own.

There’s not much you can do to stop Harrison Ford or Indiana Jones. That’s why Jackson was so eager to join them.

“I was kinda hoping [they would find me a role],” he joked of a cameo in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” “They said they couldn’t!”

There was a time when Ford was in six of the top 15 highest grossing movies of all time, thanks to “Indiana Jones” and a little trilogy called “Star Wars.” Twenty years later, Jackson got to voyage to a galaxy far, far, away, but as for “Jones” he’s out of luck — and it’s not like he was asking to be the villain or even the sidekick.

“I didn’t care,” he said. “I was trying to be the porter at the train station. Whatever! That’s all it’d take.”

Oh well, he laughed, there’s always “Indy 5.”