Honestly Ron Howard, talk about phoning it in. Yes, we all know how successful The Da Vinci Code was, but put some effort in.

Because its sequel Angels & Demons might be the top movie at the weekend box office this week, but have you ever considered what made The Da Vinci Code so popular in the first place? That’s right – Tom Hanks’ tatty old mullet.

But look at his Angels & Demons haircut, for crying out loud. It’s almost normal. Honestly, there had better be a deleted DVD scene where Tom Hanks gives himself a bubble perm, or there’ll be riots.
So Angels & Demons is the US weekend box office number one, and we’ll admit to being a little surprised. Because, you know, it’s an adaptation of a Dan Brown book, so everyone already knows what they’ll get – a drop of anti-Catholic rhetoric, some gormless cryptic clues, enough real-life locations to ensure that anywhere mentioned in the book will get overrun by fat Americans shouting at each other about McDonalds for the next decade and terrible, terrible haircuts.

The worst thing about Angels & Demons, though, is that we suspect we’re going to look back on its time at the top of the US weekend box office fondly purely because it isn’t an impenetrable film about robots punching each other. Such a shame. Here’s the US weekend box office top five…

1 - Angels & Demons (Ron Howard may argue that Angels & Demons isn’t an anti-Catholic film, but did you know that the working title of Dan Brown’s first draft was entitled The Pope Has A Bum Where His Face Should Be And He Poos Out Of His Face And Then He Eats It With His Bum Which Is Also His Face? True story. Well, true-ish) $48,000,000

2 - Star Trek (It’s a controversial admission, we know, but we couldn’t find much to like about Star Trek. Next time put Captain Kirk in a girdle and a wig like nature intended and we’ll think about revising our opinion) $43,000,000

3 - X-Men Origins: Wolverine (No wonder Wolverine looks so angry all the time. If you’d sent your entire upbringing dropping to your knees and howling “NOOOO!” to the heavens every three seconds you’d be pretty narked off too) $14,800,000

4 - Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past (Where Matthew McConaughey sets out to sexually defile the corpses of all of his dead girlfriends. We assume) $6,860,000

5 – Obsessed (The moral of this film is supposedly ‘be careful who you flirt with’ even though, in our considered opinion, it’s actually ‘don’t watch Obsessed’) $4,550,000

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The problem with filming the devil’s movies is that if any of the scenes require the architecture of a church, the owners of said church, along with their serious-minded boards of directors, must pass off on it.

This is where Angels and Demons has recently run into trouble. There is a scene in the book where Tom Hanks & a hot German woman named Elsa (who’d only recently slept with his father) break through a church floor, follow some flowing gasoline through a gathered crowd of rats to an old dead knight with a clue on his shield.

Now they can’t film any of this on location – the Rome Diocese has banned it.

The location slack will reportedly be picked up by two Kingdom Halls and a Mormon stake center. This of course means not a single gargoyle will be shot on camera. It’s bad because they need a gargoyle that comes to life just in time to save Tom Hanks from the exploding jelly truck. It’s really a pinnacle scene.

Thanks a lot, Diocese.

When The Da Vinci Code burst on to movie screens just before the book based on it was released, thousands of people everywhere cheered because it had been advertised as a Harry Potter sequel. Then, of course, it wasn’t and people cut theater screens with pocket knives out of rage.

Those people should have listened to the Catholic church – they’d been warning since Paul’s first epistle to the Romans not to see that movie. After seeing it ourselves we think the reasoning may just have been the poor plot line.

Whatever the reason, now Dan Brown‘s prequel book Angels & Demons is in Italy getting filmed, and they needed some church locations to do so.

On this front all is not going well, as the New York Times will no doubt tell you:

“Two years after Vatican officials urged a boycott of the film “The Da Vinci Code,” based on Mr. Brown’s blockbuster novel, the Rome diocese said Monday that two churches had been declared off limits to film crews for “Angels & Demons,” the “Da Vinci Code” prequel, The Associated Press reported. Msgr. Marco Fibbi, a spokesman for the diocese, said that the film “does not conform to our views” and “treats religious issues in a way that contrasts with common religious sentiment.” Permission to film inside Santa Maria del Popolo, above, and Santa Maria della Vittoria, both in central Rome, was denied in 2007, but the situation did not become crucial until now because production of the movie was delayed by the writers’ strike.”

Luckily the ban only means the insides of the churches are off limits – the outsides are still a go. Maybe with a system of harnesses and a sideways camera the scenes could be shot with Tom Hanks walking along an outer wall as if it were an inner floor. CGI could be used to put in a ceiling and visually fix the gravitational pull on that bad wig.

We’re just throwing out options here.

Although the ongoing writers' strike means that you'll probably have to wait another year to see how crappy the new season of 24 is, it's not all bad – the strike has meant that the sequel to The Da Vinci Code has been delayed.

Apparently Angels & Demons, the chronological prequel to last year's clergy-enraging The Da Vinci Code, is the first big-name movie to be hit by the writers' strike, and its release date of Christmas 2008 has now been pushed back to May 2009 at the earliest because the script isn't good enough. But, hey, let's not get glum because we have to wait to see Ron Howard grind out another tedious, tourist-baiting film about how rubbish it is to be a Catholic – in the intervening time, not only can Ron Howard try to make Angels & Demons look vaguely interesting, but Tom Hanks has gained an extra half-year to style his hair into a mullet that's even more preposterous than the one from The Da Vinci Code.

The Da Vinci Code was one of those universally-popular books that everyone seemed to enjoy, mainly because it meant that they could go on holiday to Paris and talk loudly about all the kids that Jesus had like some sort of titting theology professor even though all they'd done was read a vaguely trashy book about it once.

But when The Da Vinci Code was made into a movie it hit a wall of protests – Catholics and the Chinese and all of Pakistan hated it, as did most movie critics and all people with a properly functioning connection between their eyes and brain. But people still went to see The Da Vinci Code, so a sequel based on Angels & Demons – Dan Brown's prequel to The Da Vinci Code – was always an inevitability. That was until the writers' strike got underway.

Thanks to the striking TV and film writers, several TV shows are already up against the wall – with late-night talkshows so far being the worst hit – but as the strike wears on, the movie industry is started to get nudged to the brink as well. And the first casualty is Angels & Demons, because screenwriter Akiva Goldman went on strike before he could make the Angels & Demons script any good. Not that it stopped him from making The Da Vinci Code very good, of course. Or Batman & Robin. Or Practical Magic. Or Lost In Space. Or I, Robot.

Anyway, all that matters is that the striking means that Angels & Demons will come out in the summer of 2009 instead of Christmas 2008, with Angels & Demons studio Columbia putting out this statement:

"With the strike nearing its third week, Columbia Pictures has postponed production of Angels & Demons. While the film-makers and the studio feel the screenplay is very strong, we do not believe it is the fully realised production draft required of this ambitious project. At this time, there is no new start date, but we are setting a release date of 15 May 2009."

We understand that you're all probably devastated that you won't get to see Angels & Demons for six months longer than you expected, so in the name of good decency, we've decided to fill you in on the plot to tide you over:

When a man is murdered (just like in The Da Vinci Code), some bloke calls upon the help of Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks is busy trying to make his hair look as much like a pelican that's been caught in an oil slick as possible, but eventually agrees to assist. Turns out it was all the work of a secret society (just like in The Da Vinci Code) that has put a bomb in the Vatican. A bunch of dark secrets about the Catholic church are uncovered (just like in The Da Vinci Code) and in the end one of the main characters turns out to be a descendant of someone you didn't expect (just like in The Da Vinci Code). To celebrate solving the mystery, Tom Hanks goes home and varnishes his hair.

That's it. Strictly speaking you should all immediately send us the £7.50 that you would have spent buying a cinema ticket to see Angels & Demons, but we'll let it slide just this once.