The role Tom Hanks refused to reprise: “The good news is contractually, we don’t have to”
Sequels are the lifeblood of cinema’s earning power and have been for a long time. For an actor, having a franchise to call their own can be the financial gift that keeps on giving. Tom Hanks is unquestionably one of the best around, but he’s never seemed too keen on returning to the well.
The character Hanks has played the most often in live-action is himself, having made plenty of cameo appearances and talking head outings in feature-length documentaries. In general, the most prolific role of his career has been the Toy Story saga’s Woody, which has never required him to set foot on a physical set.
An unexpected outing in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is the one and only occasion Hanks has popped up in the follow-up to a film he wasn’t originally in, which places Robert Langdon on a pedestal of his own as the solitary character the two-time Academy Award-winning icon has ever embodied more than once in live-action.
It was a lucrative gig, with The Da Vinci Code reigning supreme as the highest-grossing non-Toy Story release in Hanks’ back catalogue. Its sequel, Angels & Demons, is second on that list of top earners, so it’s fair to say audiences were suitably won over by the leading man and director Ron Howard traipsing across Europe to solve preposterous conspiracy theories that threatened to upset the established world order.
Hanks called the trilogy “hooey,” which is fair enough because that’s exactly what it was, but author Dan Brown penned five Langdon novels, leaving The Lost Symbol and Origin untouched by cinema thus far. The trio comfortably cleared a billion dollars in ticket sales, and the studio presumably wanted to get the band back together for at least one more, which faced an insurmountable roadblock when Hanks decided he didn’t want to do it.
“The good news is, contractually, we don’t have to,” he informed CinemaBlend of why he and Howard skipped The Lost Symbol. “This is all our voluntary actions.” It’s difficult for a studio to convince an actor to make a movie when they’re clearly not interested, and they have no contractual or financial obligations to do so, which ended the Langdon series at three.
However, because no marketable property is ever left on the shelf to gather dust for too long, any plans to bring The Lost Symbol to multiplexes were scrapped in favour of reworking the book as a TV show. Ashley Zukerman replaced Hanks as a much younger iteration of Langdon for the streaming exclusive that aired on Peacock, which ended up being cancelled after one season because it was a bit rubbish, and nobody watched it.
The Da Vinci Code trilogy was nothing to write home about, either, but at least it had Hanks and his strangely floppy hair to draw in a crowd.
