In early 2000s, the world went wild for Dan Brown’s series of page-turners featuring Professor Robert Langdon. His high-octane and controversial tales of religious symbols and iconology soon made it to the big screen with the Tom Hanks’ films The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons and Inferno.
Intriguingly, the cinematic run skipped the 2009 book, The Lost Symbol. Columbia Pictures did indeed begin production on that novel but as a final script neared completion, they passed on it, unable to shape the novel to their satisfaction. Director Ron Howard said: “Cinematically, when Lost Symbol came out, I think our feeling, my feeling was that it’s a terrific, another terrific novel. It’s great material, but it felt like, coming close on the heels of Angels and Demons and Da Vinci Code, that thematically and tonally, it might feel a little bit too much like the other books, at that particular moment. [Inferno] immediately felt like a cinematic next step, and that excited us.” Which is a polite way of saying Dan Brown was basically recycling the novels with different locations and symbolic hokum.
It seems a decent passage of time to revive the novel as a 10-episode TV series. The producers have also taken the decision to make it a prequel to events of The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. For those who don’t know the book, The Lost Symbol sees the discovery of a severed hand placed in the Capitol’s Rotunda. It turns out to be that of Robert Langdon’s mentor, Peter Solomon.