It seems like everywhere I turn, I am hearing people squeal about how the Da Vinci Code is anti-Christian and more evidence of Hollywood’s anti-Christian bias. Enter Michael Medved, Christianity’s biggest Jewish supporter:
MEDVED: I do, but the buzz has turned very decisively negative. When you see that there are people in India who are talking about fasting to the death to protest the film.
When the Gallup poll shows that 48 percent of Americans say they will definitely not see “The Da Vinci Code”, that‘s not a good sign for a box office blockbuster.
One of the things you see with this movie, Tucker, as I have been writing about this for 20 years literally, that Hollywood keeps attacking religion again and again and again. Films that have anti-religious themes and particularly anti-Catholic themes and they never make a dime. They tend to do very, very badly at the box office.
Now this film has a guaranteed box office return because of the tremendous success of the novel. But the idea that, by refusing to soften some of the anti-Christian, some of the—what people would consider to be heretical themes in the movie, that they could have, by softening it, I think ensured a much greater financial indication.
I don’t have any links to offer, but I am pretty sure ‘Hollywood’ didn’t commission Dan Brown to write the Code. In fact, I am willing to bet he never expected to sell 40 million copies, and I am reasonably sure Hollywood is only ‘attacking Christians’ with this movie BECAUSE the book sold 40 million copies.
I have no problem with critics panning this movie, but the sheer idiocy of the professionally aggrieved religious right is, as always, a bit too much to swallow. I will say this one last time- the Da Vinci Code is fiction. Much like creationism, for that matter. If I hear any more whinging on this subject, I am going to begin to think the Romans had the right idea.