Why Tom Hanks’ The Lost Symbol Movie Was Cancelled (& Became A TV Show)

Why Tom Hanks’ The Lost Symbol Movie Was Cancelled (& Became A TV Show)

Why did Tom Hanks and Ron Howard skip The Lost Symbol in the Robert Langdon franchise? Here’s why the book was adapted into a new TV series.

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Why Tom Hanks’ The Lost Symbol Movie Was Cancelled (& Became A TV Show)

Here’s why Tom Hanks’ The Lost Symbol movie, a part of the Robert Langdon film franchise, was canceled, and eventually adapted into a series of the same name. Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is the third installment in the established Robert Langdon timeline, dealing with the Harvard symbologist’s race against time in Washington D.C., which purportedly hosts an ancient portal promising apotheosis. As director Ron Howard and leading man Tom Hanks decided to skip this text in the movie franchise, The Lost Symbol was transformed into a series featuring a younger Langdon. The show premiered on September 16, 2021, and is available for streaming on Peacock.

Despite dealing with a wide range of secret societies, underground cults, cryptic documents, and monuments laden with religio-cultural significance, all Dan Brown novels follow a formulaic approach in terms of the Robert Langdon narratives. The explosive success of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons on the big screen can be attributed to the intricacies of the plot, which branches out like a maze and unites discordant elements and symbols across history and time. While The Da Vinci Code dealt exclusively with the lore of the Holy Grail lore and its related symbolism, Angels and Demons forayed deep into the crypts of the Vatican’s best-kept secrets, and the existence of a society named The Illuminati.

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It is interesting to note that The Lost Symbol deals exclusively with Freemasonry and the quest for a higher knowledge that allows man to ascend into divinity. This, of course, plays out in quintessential Brownian fashion, with Langdon at the nexus of the mystery, exacerbated by the kidnapping of Langdon’s mentor, Peter Solomon (Eddie Izzard). In an interview with CinemaBlend, Hanks explained that while he and Howard worked on The Lost Symbol for a while in order to gauge whether it would work, they came to the conclusion that the plot was too reminiscent of the first two films in the franchise. The exploration of Freemasonry in The Lost Symbol echoed the theoretical dilemmas touched upon in Angels and Demons, while also mirroring the Priory of Sion and The Knights Templar in The Da Vinci Code.

Hence, due to the narratorial and thematic similarities between The Lost Symbol and its cinematic predecessors, Howard and Hanks decided to skip ahead and focus on Brown’s next novel, Inferno. This was an interesting choice, as the narrative of Inferno hinged on Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, along with a plotline that focused on a transhumanist scientist hell-bent on unleashing a biological plague in order to halt the world’s population growth. While Inferno provided a tonally fresh aspect to the Robert Langdon trilogy, the adaptation was unable to do justice to the source material and received mixed to negative reviews from critics, despite the fact that it was a commercial success.

Recognizing the untapped potential of The Lost Symbol, the project was reconceived as a television series in 2019, initially titled Langdon. Soon, Peacock picked up the series, which is set to serve as a prequel connection to Tom Hanks’ Robert Langdon movies, with Ashley Zukerman (Fear Street trilogy) assuming the role of a young Langdon. The series will most likely delve into Langdon’s psyche in great detail, as it has the opportunity to flesh out his inner motivations and present him as more than a man entranced by symbols. The Lost Symbol will also offer a glimpse into the characters of Mal’akh (Keenan Jolliff), Peter Solomon, and Catherine Solomon (Valorie Curry), which will be a delight for those who are fans of the literary series.

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Link Source : https://screenrant.com/lost-symbol-movie-canceled-why-tom-hanks/

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