Guess the pope won’t be buying a ticket to ANGELS AND DEMONS

May 5th, 2009 at 11:05am Will Pfeifer

With his long history of playing nice guys and heck, generally being a nice guy, you’d think everyone would like Ron Howard. And with its huge box office and equally huge book sales record, you think everyone would like movies based on the conspiracy pulp novels of Dan Brown.

But you’d be wrong on both counts. According to Howard himself, the Vatican wasn’t exactly thrilled with his upcoming thriller, ANGELS AND DEMONS. In fact, they tried to stop it from being made. From an Associated Press article:

“When you come to film in Rome, the official statement to you is that the Vatican has no influence,” he said. “Everything progressed very smoothly, but unofficially a couple of days before we were to start filming in several of our locations, it was explained to us that through back channels and so forth that the Vatican had exerted some influence.”

ANGELS AND DEMONS focuses on the Illuminati, a legendary secret society that supposed pulls the strings behind world events. In this story, they’re plotting against the Catholic church, and Harvard symbols expert Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks in a less ridiculous haircut than he sported in THE DA VINCI CODE) has to save the day. In other words, the Vatican is apparently working against a film where they’re on the side of the goodguys.

You’d think, given all the other problems in the world, they’d have better things to worry about. But again, you’d be wrong.

Entry Filed under: Controversy