The Fantastic Da Vinci Code War Of The Worlds

Appropos of a comment on this site, referring to comments at Quoth the Maven and Plein Air Sketches, some data on the box offcie results for The Da Vinci Code: Weekend Box Office Results, May 26–28, 2006. The film suffered a drop-off of 55% from it's opening weekend, which is not unusual for a heavily promoted summer movies. The trouble is, this puts The Da Vinci Code in the company of movies like The Fantastic Four and The War Of The Worlds. Like The Da Vinci Code, these movies benefited from incessant promotion, a tie-in to a known vehicle, and in the case of The War Of The Worlds, a the presence of a top-flight star. Like The Da Vinci Code, these movies lost about 55% of their business in their second weekend, and then descended rapidly towards oblivion. The primary defect of these movies was that they were silly in the extreme (see Roger Ebert's review), and once their built-in fan base had indulged themselves the theaters emptied out.

So my prediction holds to a point. I had said I thought The Da Vinci Code would fail miserably. It's failure was not miserable, but it has still failed. It joins the evergrowing list of movies that everyone got agitated about at their opening only to be considered a few weeks later a waste of a $9.00 ticket. The legacy of The Da Vinci Code will not benefit the novel: it will now be known to many as that book they made the stupid movie about.

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