There’s a new mystery for Dan Brown’s symbology professor Robert Langdon to investigate. Two, actually – one will likely be seen on the big screen, as Da Vinci Code/Angels & Demons duo Tom Hanks and Ron Howard have announced plans to film Brown’s latest tome, Inferno.
This outing finds Langdon in Italy, grappling with a chilling puzzle revolving around Dante’s Inferno. He’ll face a new and cunning adversary and an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science.
Can he solve the problem before the world is forever changed? Given his track record, we’re going to guess he has a good shot. The book arrived in May and is now in development at Sony, but Deadline could find no word on a writer.
The other mystery will be whatever happened to The Lost Symbol, Brown’s third Langdon adventure and one that has been bubbling away in development itself since 2011. Ron Howard seemed unwilling to revisit the series, and stepped away to produce, with Mark Romanek seen as the likely replacement. But though Brown himself and Steven Knight worked on a script, the film has quietly disappeared.
With Inferno now the focus and Howard apparently back – though it’ll have to wait at least until he’s made In The Heart Of The Sea – it seems the Symbol will stay lost for now.
Howard’s latest, Rush, arrives on September 13.