Tom Hanks’ Blockbuster Thriller That He Said Is Loaded With ‘Nonsense’ Just Found a New Streaming Home

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“Loaded with all sorts of hooey and fun kind of scavenger-hunt-type nonsense” is how Tom Hanks described The Da Vinci Code. Hanks starred throughout Ron Howard’s three-film adaptation of Dan Brown’s novel series as Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist who deciphers clues in Leonardo da Vinci’s art to uncover a secret society and a centuries-old conspiracy revolving around the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. The first film in the controversial trilogy, The Da Vinci Code, started streaming on Peacock on January 1st, joining its sequel Angels & Demons and the Peacock prequel series The Lost Symbol on the NBCUniversal platform. The third film in the trilogy, Inferno, isn’t on Peacock currently.

The Da Vinci Code Was a Controversial Box Office Hit

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The Da Vinci Code scored a massive $760 million worldwide box office run during its theatrical release, making it the second-highest-grossing film of 2006, and it even overtook Forrest Gump as Hanks’ highest-grossing live-action film, but it didn’t get there without some controversy. The movie’s fictional claims, particularly that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and fathered a child, sparked widespread debate, protests, and calls for a boycott, and even prompted the Vatican to appoint an archbishop to debunk the film’s contents.

The interest of the controversy, coupled with the fact that it arrived during a period where book adaptations proved to be big box office wins, fueled The Da Vinci Code’s massive commercial success. However, the movie couldn’t replicate that success when it came to overall viewer consensus. The film only earned a 27% critic score and 57% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Other than its religious and historical criticisms, the book’s dense text didn’t translate the best to the screen, feeling more like a boring lecture disguised as a thriller, and the film suffered from a slow pace, clunky flashbacks, and stiff performances.

Hanks eventually pushed back against some of those criticisms, as well as the movie’s deep controversy, telling the Evening Standard in 2006, “We always knew there would be a segment of society that would not want this movie to be shown. But the story we tell is loaded with all sorts of hooey and fun kind of scavenger-hunt-type nonsense. If you are going to take any sort of movie at face value, particularly a huge-budget motion picture like this, you’d be making a very big mistake.”

What’s New on Peacock?

The Da Vinci Code is far from the only movie freshly streaming on Peacock. The NBCUniversal streamer has grown its content catalog throughout January with the arrival of films such as Changeling, House of Gucci, Mad Max, The Shawshank Redemption, and Us.

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