One of my kids is avidly reading Dan Brown’s best-selling book, and so we’ve been talking about it. The question of whether it had been turned into a movie came up, but none of us knew whether the film had actually been released or not. However, all were agreed that it was a certainty that Hollywood would do it.

Now comes an interesting article in today’s New York Times which sheds some light on the matter. It seems that Sony is making the film (directed by Ron Howard, who won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, and starring Tom Hanks), but a tight curtain of secrecy surrounds the project. Why?

Well, essentially because the central tenet of the book’s plot (which is is that Jesus had a child by Mary Magdalene and the Catholic Church has been ruthlessly trying to kill the story ever since) upsets certain powerful groups in US society. For example, the US catholic lobby and christian fundamentalists are very hostile to a movie which might lend credence to Mr Brown’s interesting conjecture. So Sony is wriggling on the horns of a dilemma. There are rumours of strong pressure on the film-makers to change the plot of the book (thereby, it seems to me, missing the entire point of the book).

Here’s how things stack up: on the one hand, there are all those Da Vinci Code fans out there (37 million copies sold, so far); on the other, all those devout Christian fanatics. Which way will Sony jump? Watch this space…