Tom Hanks’ $760M Mystery Thriller Is Officially Available to Stream for Free

He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema. 

After decades in the business, Tom Hanks has certainly found his audience and retained it. He offers them World War II movies, feel-good dramas, and even pulse-pounding potboilers. Among his most successful films is a mystery based on a bestselling novel. The movie was released two decades ago and was successful enough to launch a franchise. It’s about to be rebooted, albeit without Hanks’ involvement. The franchise’s first installment was recently added to the library of a free streaming platform, just as its 20th-anniversary year comes to an end.

Hugely controversial at the time of its release, the movie’s religious themes divided audiences much like a fellow blockbuster from two years earlier. In 2004, audiences around the world experienced Mel Gibson‘s The Passion of the Christ, which defied mixed reviews to gross more than $620 million worldwide. Hanks’ film was released in 2006. It received worse reviews, but was a bigger hit, grossing around $760 million worldwide against a reported budget of $130 million.

The movie had an infamous premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was reportedly met with jeers from certain sections of the audience. This divisiveness continued after the film’s theatrical release, when some viewers questioned its historical accuracy. Hanks was shocked at the response; in his mind, the movie was nothing more than an entertaining thriller with little resemblance to reality. “Those are delightful scavenger hunts that are about as accurate to history as the James Bond movies are to espionage… All we were doing is promising a diversion,” he told The New York Times in 2022.

A great detective is really just a personality with a method attached,
which is why we keep remaking the same four of them. Here is yours, what it says about you, and the
case for them being the best in the business.

You let people think you are not a threat and then you simply
never go away. Columbo is the only major detective show that tells you who did it in the
first ten minutes, because the pleasure was never the puzzle, it was watching a rich man
slowly realise he is in trouble.

• You are underestimated constantly, and you have stopped minding because it keeps
  working.
• The show invented the inverted detective format for television and nobody has bettered
  it since.
• Peter Falk won four Emmys for the part and played him across five decades.
• Your flaw is that one more question is rarely one more question.

You are the most interesting person in the room and you know
exactly how to use it. Rian Johnson built Blanc as a gentleman detective who is also an
outsider everywhere he goes, which lets him be charming at people who would never otherwise
talk to him.

• You read a room in seconds and you are not above performing a little to speed things up.
• Rian Johnson was nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Knives Out in
  2020.
• Wake Up Dead Man arrived on Netflix in December, making three Blanc films in six years.
• Your risk is enjoying the performance so much that people stop taking the point
  seriously.

Everybody tells you everything, and you have never once asked
them to. Jessica Fletcher is a crime novelist from a small town in Maine who is so warm and
so obviously trustworthy that suspects confess to her essentially as a social courtesy.

• You are the person friends call first, and you have a frankly alarming amount of
  information about everybody.
• Angela Lansbury was nominated for the Emmy twelve times for this role and never won
  once.
• The show ran twelve seasons, and Jamie Lee Curtis is now bringing the character back.
• Your flaw is that being told everything is only a gift if you know what to do with it.

You expect to be lied to and you are almost never disappointed.
Chandler wrote Marlowe as a man with a rigid private code in a city that has none, which is
why he takes the case, solves it, gets nothing out of it and takes the next one.

• You are the most cynical person your friends know and the one they would call at four in
  the morning.
• Bogart played him in The Big Sleep in 1946 and the plot is famously impossible to
  follow, which matters not at all.
• Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum and Liam Neeson have all taken the part, and every version
  says something about its decade.
• Your weakness is a code so strict that it mostly punishes the person holding it.

Here’s Where You Can Watch ‘The Da Vinci Code’ for Free

• Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

• Image via Sony

• Image via Sony

• Image via Sony

• Image via Columbia/courtesy Everett Collection

Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

Image via Sony

Image via Sony

Image via Sony

Image via Columbia/courtesy Everett Collection

• Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

• Image via Sony

• Image via Sony

• Image via Sony

• Image via Columbia/courtesy Everett Collection

Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

Image via Sony

Image via Sony

Image via Sony

Image via Columbia/courtesy Everett Collection

We’re talking, of course, about The Da Vinci Code, which Hanks called “hooey” in the same interview. The movie now holds a 25% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “What makes Dan Brown‘s novel a bestseller is evidently not present in this dull and bloated movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code.” The movie also featured Jean Reno, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Paul Bettany, and Alfred Molina.

The Da Vinci Code was added to the Pluto TV library this month, along with its two sequels, also starring Hanks in the lead role. Both follow-ups — Angels & Demons and Inferno — received poor reviews as well, and the franchise saw a decline in box-office returns. The series was rebooted as a television show that lasted one season on Peacock. A new reboot series is in development at Netflix.

Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.

The Da Vinci Code