“The Da Vinci Code,” directed by Ron Howard and based on Dan Brown’s immensely successful airport potboiler, was one of the year’s biggest blockbusters, grossing $760 million worldwide and temporarily becoming a cultural phenomenon. There was a time when Brown’s book was on everyone’s nightstand in the United States. It was almost like a Gideon Bible, a suburban standard issue. The “Da Vinci” fad, on the other hand, was short-lived, and it was not long before local Goodwills were bursting at the seams with hundreds of secondhand “Da Vinci” copies apiece.
Tom Hanks Called The Movies “Hooey”
Da Vinci craze had officially worn off by 2022, when all three “Da Vinci” movies (“Inferno” was released in 2016), and the audience could finally reflect back on how horrible the first movie was.
Tom Hanks, for example, expressed himself in this way. In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Hanks, who played professional “symbologist” Robert Langdon in all three “Da Vinci” films, slammed the series as “hooey,” in the worst conceivable terms for Hanks.
In hindsight, Tom Hanks sees how ridiculous the whole thing was, praising the film’s lack of historical truth and clumsy, foolish commercial appeal. While recognizing that the “Da Vinci Code” films were more commercial than intelligent, Tom Hanks remained delicately realistic about commercial entertainments in general; after all, he has not appeared in any generally attractive commercial items outside of “Da Vinci.” Tom Hanks believes that as long as a franchise is profitable, it makes financial sense to continue generating sequels, even if the art of the series has long ago been forgotten.
