It sounded very suspicious when I heard that there have been no screenings of The Da Vinci Code prior to Wednesday's premier at the Cannes Film Festival. As if that was not enough of an indicator, pre-release screenings of the film are extremely limited, with presumably only the reviewers in the biggest cities having access to the film. So, unless your local reviewer is at Canne or works in New York, L.A., or Chicago, you can count on there being no advance reviews. What all this means is that The Da Vinci Code stinks, and Columbia is trying to hide that fact long enough for a big opening weekend to result. The problem is that the film skews older. It's the teenagers that usually pile into the theaters on opening weekend. So word might get around well before Code passes 100 million. With a huge budget and a lot of hype (you have to wonder how much they had to pay for the book rights), the movie will be a big disappointment if it doesn't come close to 200 million.
But with Ron Howard as the director, is this a surprise? He has made some bad, bad movies, and a convincing argument can be made that A Beautiful Mind is the worst film to win Best Picture in the last 30 years. Being attached to screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (Batman and Robin, Lost in Space) only lessens Howard's chances of coming up with a good movie from one of the biggest selling novels of all time.
