Ron Howard, who directed The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons (as well as modern classics like The Dilemma – seriously, has the man made a watchable film this millennium?) has explicitly ruled out a return to the Dan Brown adaptation stable for inevitable threequel The Lost Symbol. I suppose we need to take these little victories when we can…

Tom Hanks hasn’t actually confirmed that he’ll return to the role of floppy-haired symbologist Robert Langdon, but it doesn’t seem likely that he’ll turn down what must be an obscenely big earner – the first two Dan Brown books to transfer to the big screen earned well over a billion dollars between them, and that sort of cheese can be quite persuasive. In any event, Sony are fishing for a replacement director and presumably wouldn’t be bothering if Hanks wasn’t a relatively dead cert.

Who do you think should take over the Langdon franchise? Kermit? Let us know below…