Common Sense

That’s what I want to ask Ron Howard and Dan Brown. Not one, not one critic or reviewer has said anything good about The Da Vinci Code since the world premiere Wednesday. That’s got to be some kind of record.

In fact, there are reports that usually sedate and professional critics were booing and hissing during the screening at the Cannes Film Festival. Can you just imagine Roger Ebert throwing Milk Duds at Tom Hanks’ head while laughing uncontrollably. I can… every night in my dreams.

Anyway, even though it is being panned, someone brought up a valid point on Attack of the Show yesterday: These are the same people that didn’t like the book. There were some 40 million copies of Dan Brown’s novel sold worldwide, so there is every reason to suspect that the box office will be well. But, and this is a big one, I think we can roughly classify the book purchasers into roughly thirds.

One third bought the book, and hated it. Plenty of guy on the street interviews can tell you that. One third bought it and read it, maybe only partially, and didn’t see what the fuss was about. One third bought it and recommended it to their friends. A third of the people in the 1770s didn’t care one way or another about independence, I think it is safe to assume that at least a third of the people who bought the book cared that it was being made into a movie.

And we’re not talking about a Harper Lee novel here. I would venture a large majority of The Da Vinci Code readers don’t even know Dan Brown has other books to his credit. Notice I didn’t mention a group of people who loved the book and/or the movie.

Seriously, I’m not hearing a lot of people demanding that I go see this movie. There is a ver vocal group demanding boycotts and a small number of Catholics in India that are trying to delay this opening. Nobody is carrying around signs recommending it to me.

The people who liked the book are not that sort of people. They are not say, comic book readers who followed every second of production for Superman Returns or X-Men 3 (which I’m looking forward to next weekend).

My prediction is that these people are perfectly willing to sit out the opening weekend to avoid the supposed crowd and maybe even willing to look toward the film critics for advice as to whether they really want to see it. I’m going to say, mmm, $25 million this weekend. It’ll be No. 1, but it won’t be anything spectacular and next weekend’s movie premieres will easily eclipse it.

I have now committed myself and we’ll see how good my predictions are. By the way, I saw some good clips from See No Evil and it looks like a fun time for weekend cinema viewing. Fun, formulaic horror movie? Yeah, but interesting death scenes and acting that cannot possibly worse than House on Haunted Hill.