The Da Vinci Code’s Robert Langdon getting a prequel TV series

Robert Langdon is making the jump to the small screen. Deadline reports that a TV series adaptation following American author Dan Brown’s literary hero with a knack for solving ancient puzzles has been given a pilot order by NBC.

Brown has penned five novels with Langdon in the lead, and it was the second of these adventures, 2003’s The Da Vinci Code which saw Hollywood come a-knocking. Sony’s movie trilogy – based on the aforementioned The Da Vinci Code (2006), Angels & Demons (2009), and Inferno (2016) – was directed by Ron Howard and starred Tom Hanks as the Harvard symbology professor. Despite that potent combo, the films have admittedly all been rather tepid, but they did earn a combined $1.4 billion worldwide off just a $350 million total budget though. With those kinds of numbers, it comes as a bit of a surprise that a new feature film adaptation isn’t on the cards instead.

The upcoming series adaptation has been in development since at least last year when Constantine co-creator Daniel Cerrone penned an early draft before departing. The pilot script was then completed by The Crossing creators Dan Dworkin and Jay Beattie, to which NBC gave a green light. The series, if it gets beyond the pilot stage, will be based on The Lost Symbol, which was chronologically the third Langdon book. Sony had originally been developing a feature film adaptation of The Lost Symbol to follow-up on Angels & Demons before changing tack and skipping to an adaptation of the fourth book, Inferno, instead. Angels & Demons had, of course, actually been the first Langdon novel set before The Da Vinci Code.

And to keep up that streak of chronologically confused adaptations, the upcoming series – which will simply be titled Langdon – will be tweaking The Lost Symbol to be a prequel to the films, focusing on a younger Robert Langdon. Here’s the official synopsis for Brown’s original novel:

Set within the hidden chambers, tunnels, and temples of Washington, D.C., The Lost Symbol accelerates through a startling landscape toward an unthinkable finale. As the story opens, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned unexpectedly to deliver an evening lecture in the U.S. Capitol Building. Within minutes of his arrival, however, the night takes a bizarre turn. A disturbing object-artfully encoded with five symbols-is discovered in the Capitol Building. Langdon recognizes the object as an ancient invitation… one meant to usher its recipient into a long-lost world of esoteric wisdom. When Langdon’s beloved mentor, Peter Solomon-a prominent Mason and philanthropist-is brutally kidnapped, Langdon realizes his only hope of saving Peter is to accept this mystical invitation and follow wherever it leads him. Langdon is instantly plunged into a clandestine world of Masonic secrets, hidden history, and never-before-seen locations-all of which seem to be dragging him toward a single, inconceivable truth.

Seeing as this will be a prequel, I only have one question: Will we see the origin story of Hanks’ laughably bad hairdo from The Da Vinci Code?

Last Updated: February 10, 2020