A still from Angels & Demons

The religious code did not stop it, but the revenue-sharing one still can. The Tom Hanks-starrer Angels & Demons looks set to give the multiplexes a miss this Friday.

Till late on Wednesday evening, the word was that Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s controversial novel of the same name would not be allowed a release at the plexes on May 29 despite the Vatican and Catholic Church of India’s green signal. The Church had earlier raised objections to the film’s content.

The film is coming to India two weeks late — the global release was on May 15 — because of protests by Christians.

The new hitch is the plex-producer standoff over revenue-sharing, which after blocking Bollywood films for two months, is now throwing up war signs that Robert Langdon would struggle to decode.

“As of now, Angels & Demons is scheduled to release only in the standalone cinemas. Talks with the multiplexes are on but we don’t have a confirmation on whether the film will eventually release at the plexes this Friday,” said a representative of Sony Pictures.

Arijit Dutta, the film’s distributor in the eastern region, said the plexes would get prints only in July.

“We are in the process of taking off publicity from the multiplexes,” Dutta said.

Virendra Marya, the regional director of INOX, blamed Sony Pictures for the impasse.

“The terms demanded by Sony Pictures for Angels & Demons are unprecedented and the multiplexes are not agreeable to those. The film may not release at the multiplexes this Friday.”

But wasn’t the Oscar-nominated Milk, starring Sean Penn, released at the plexes without any problem a few Fridays ago?

According to a source, films like Milk, The Reader and Revolutionary Road were screened by the plexes because they were released in the rest of the country before the strike.

Angels & Demons and another big Hollywood film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, took a hit because their distributors planned a “pan-India” release the same Friday and came under the purview of the strike.

“The fact that we have a presence in Bollywood through productions like Saawariya means that we are also a part of the strike,” explained the Sony Pictures representative.

The ones who will benefit from the confusion over Angels & Demons are the single-screen theatres that are slated to screen the film from Friday.

“We have received a lot of queries. We are hopeful of good advance collections,” said Debashish Dey of Paradise and Roxy, which will screen the Hindi and English versions of the film respectively.

“Angels & Demons should do well in the city because the Calcutta cinema crowd has grown up watching English films at standalone cinemas like New Empire and Lighthouse,” said Arijit Dutta, who owns Priya and Star Theatre.

For Hanks and Dan Brown fans like Sunit Chakraborty, it really does not matter where the film is released this Friday as long as it is in a hall in the city . “I loved the book and can’t wait to watch the film. If that means going to a single-screen theatre, I am game,” said the college student, a resident of Golf Green.

But for the likes of Manish Singhania, no multiplex means no movie. “I would have loved to catch Angels & Demons this weekend, but I am definitely not going to a standalone theatre,” said the young businessman.

The Da Vinci Code, also featuring Hanks as symbologist Robert Langdon, was a big box-office success.