Nikke Finke at Deadline: Hollywood reports,

I’m told that Akiva Goldsman, who adapted Dan Brown’s worldwide bestseller into a $755.6 mil hit pic, is receiving $4 million for the Da Vinci Code sequel in the works by both Imagine Entertainment and Sony Pictures.

Meanwhile, the Da Vinci Code pre-quel, Angels and Demons, is coming to the big screen.

Finke says:

In A&D, Goldsman must make sense of a plot crammed with Vatican intrigue and high-tech drama: it thrusts Langdon together with an ancient and shadowy secret brotherhood, the Illuminati, the most powerful underground organization ever to walk the earth. Their enemy is the Catholic Church and they’re detemined to carry out the final phase of a legendary vendetta against it.

Yes!! Alright! Time for Christians to re-start that media machine that declares, “Christians should engage in The Da Vinci Dialogue! Christians should buy tickets for the whole congregation, thus paying Sony ‘thank-you’ money for making entertainment that serves up lame-brained attacks on the church!”

I’m kidding, of course. I think it was one of the most embarrassing moments in Christian engagement with art and entertainment, the way we ran headline after headline, story after story, encouraging Christians to seize this opportunity to enrich a cultural dialogue.

I’m all for vigorous dialogue about art, but why spend so many resources encouraging people to spend their money on THIS movie? This movie is hot air and empty glamour. This movie is a mistake. This movie doesn’t offer us much fodder for worthwhile discussion. It’s bland, forgettable Hollywood entertainment. Instead, we could be focusing our time and attention on rich, meaningful art!

Why didn’t we bother to invite our neighbors to see and discuss Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, which is a much better movie, with an Oscar-worthy lead performance, and all kinds of great storytelling about faith, history, power, and truth-telling?

And what ever came of all of those aggressive “Christians should see The Da Vinci Code and discuss it with their neighbors!” campaigns? Do we have any stories yet of a wave of people turning to Christ? Did it bring about anything lasting and life-changing? Or did we just pat ourselves on the back for having “engaged the culture”?

What did I hear from those moviegoers who actually gave Sony ten bucks for the privilege? Believer and unbeliever alike responded, “Man oh man, that was a long, boring movie!”

How bad was the movie? It was so bad that advertisements for the DVD try to win back people’s interest with a bunch of hooey about how there are “secret symbols hidden in the movie that you didn’t see the first time! Find the symbols and solve the code!” Good grief. Suddenly, big screen movies are stooping to the tactics of cereal-box gimmickry.

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