Ron Howard Reverses Luck!

Despite strong criticism from christians worldwide and mainly negative reviews from movie-critics at its world premiere at the Cannes film festival and also immediately after its release, "Da Vinci" went on to score the second-biggest opening tally of all time at the global box office, raking in nearly $238 million worldwide in its opening weekend. This record would place the movie behind only Star Wars III -The Revenge of the Sith which made 253 million dollars in its first days.

2006 would thus remain to be a great year in Director Ron Howard's memory. The year 2005 was not so kind to him. We love Ron Howard mainly because he offered us that wonderful film called "A Beautiful mind" and we still feel sorry for the failure of his last year's directorial excellence -- Cinderella Man, a movie which had all element to be a hit but could not go anywhere because of, we think, a poor choice of its release date in between Star Wars III and the War of the World .

It was such a setback for the movie and some movie-lovers that, in a rare marketing ploy, the No. 2 U.S. movie theater chain, AMC Entertainment offered a money-back guarantee for seeing "Cinderella Man," hoping to boost interest in the struggling film amid a record box-office slump. Advertisements offering on-the-spot refunds to AMC patrons unhappy with the film began running June 24 in newspapers but even then it couldn't attract crowd. The ads, welcomed by the film's distributor, Universal Pictures, said in part: "AMC believes Cinderella Man is one of the finest motion pictures of the year!" Many, who later watched the film in DVD, admitted that it was a wonderful film which they somehow missed.

This time, however, Ron's choice was great. "The Da Vinci Code" was already a popular novel and a controversial one too. Many movie-critics (including 2movie) didn't like the film mainly because it closely followed the storyline, which made it boring.

But it was already in the agenda of people and they lined up in theaters and started trickling in money to the box office to make it a huge success and finally reversed the fortune of Ron Howard. Congratulations, Ron!