Word: da
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...opening day. And occasionally there's a film people see because they want to - because a friend told them it's fun, or they've already enjoyed it and want to return. This weekend, obligation was represented by Angels & Demons, a sequel of sorts to the 2006 superhit The Da Vinci Code, with the same star, Tom Hanks, and director, Ron Howard; and pure movie pleasure, by last week's winner, Star Trek, which has enjoyed enthusiastic reviews and word of mouth. Angels beat Trek, but not quite in the way a debuting blockbuster should steamroll a movie that opened...
...reasons for the relatively close finish - a new hit typically doubles the weekend take of the movie it's replaced - are easy to enumerate. The Da Vinci Code was a publishing phenomenon with the added balm of religious controversy; the movie version earned $77 million its first weekend. Angels, actually a prequel, didn't generate the kind of heat that spurs audiences to see it immediately. Also, Dan Brown, the author of both Da Vinci and Angels, is a powerhouse literary name but not yet a megamovie franchise; Star Trek, the latest in a series of film spin-offs that...
...match that haul. But Hanks' films usually don't open with a big bang; audiences discover them over time, and by the end, he has a Forrest Gump. At 52, Hanks is not the ideal age for a teen kid's movie icon; his one starring role since Da Vinci, in Charlie Wilson's War, brought in only $65 million. So Hanks should probably be happy with the huge salary he earned for making Angels, for the fact that it did manage to edge out the competition for the weekend's No. 1 slot...
...chosen to lead the tour is a thornier question. The essentially reverent Angels, which portrays the Catholic hierarchy as the victim, not the perpetrator, of a grandly evil plot, was written before The Da Vinci Code. So in the order of publishing, it made sense that the church would initially allow Langdon to pursue his doctrinal theories. In the order of the movies, though, it beggars belief that Langdon, having exposed a truth the Vatican has suppressed for millennia, would be asked to consult on the kidnapped-Cardinals caper. Yet apparently L'Osservatore Romano doesn't hold a grudge. After...
...That's right, Mr. Baehr: Howard and Hanks are tithing to the Democratic Party, which as everyone knows is the political arm of the satanic conspiracy. He might also have mentioned a suspicious bit of numerology: the worldwide box-office gross of The Da Vinci Code, if you subtract what the movie earned in the heathen countries of Japan and China, came to almost exactly... $666 million...