The Da Vinci Code is a 2006 American mystery thriller film directed by Ron Howard and written by Akiva Goldsman, adapted from Dan Brown's 2003 best-selling novel of the same name. The film stars Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, Jürgen Prochnow, Jean Reno, and Paul Bettany.
In the film, Robert Langdon, a professor of religious iconography and symbology from Harvard University, is the prime suspect in the grisly and unusual murder of Louvre curator Jacques Saunière. He escapes with the assistance of a police cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and they are embroiled in a quest for the legendary Holy Grail. He is pursued by a dogged French police captain, Bezu Fache. A noted British Grail historian, Sir Leigh Teabing, tells them the actual Holy Grail is explicitly encoded in Leonardo da Vinci's wall painting, the Last Supper. Also searching for the Grail is a secret cabal within Opus Dei, an actual prelature of the Holy See, who wishes to keep the true Grail a secret; the revelation of this secret would certainly destroy Christianity.
The Da Vinci Code is a 2003 mystery-detective novel by Dan Brown. It follows symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu after a murder in the Louvre Museum in Paris, when they become involved in a battle between the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei over the possibility of Jesus Christ having been married to Mary Magdalene. The title of the novel refers, among other things, to the finding of the first murder victim in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, naked and posed like Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing, the Vitruvian Man, with a cryptic message written beside his body and a pentagram drawn on his chest in his own blood.
The novel explores an alternative religious history, whose central plot point is that the Merovingian kings of France were descended from the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, ideas derived from Clive Prince's The Templar Revelation (1997) and books by Margaret Starbird. The book also refers to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) though Dan Brown has stated that it was not used as research material.
The Da Vinci Code is a 2006 adventure/puzzle video game developed by The Collective and published by 2K Games for PlayStation 2, Xbox and Microsoft Windows.
Although the game was released on the same day the film of the same name opened in theatres, it is based on the 2003 novel by Dan Brown, not the film. As such, the characters in the game do not resemble nor sound like their filmic counterparts. The game also changes some aspects of Brown's original story; for example, in the novel and film, the religious sect is a fictionalized version of the real "Opus Dei" (meaning "work of God"), but in the game, the sect is changed to the completely fictional "Manus Dei" (meaning "hand of God").
The Da Vinci Code was met with mainly negative reviews across all platforms. Although some critics praised the game's fidelity to its source material, the majority criticized the graphics and basic gameplay, particularly the melee combat, arguing it failed as both an adventure game and a puzzle game. The game was also a commercial failure.
The Da Vinci Code is a novel by Dan Brown published in 2003.
The Da Vinci Code may also refer to: