<span style="font-size:120%;">Given the critical apathy that greeted the big-screen adaptations of Dan Brown's bestselling novels The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, it might come as little shock that studio executives are reaching out to a new screenwriter for the next instalment in the series.What might be more surprising is that producers have not turned to him before – for the man in charge of script duties for the forthcoming film version of Brown's The Lost Symbol will be ... Dan Brown.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Columbia Pictures has decided to draft in the novelist to adapt his most recent novel. The Lost Symbol sees Brown's regular hero, the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, caught up in a Freemason plot in Washington DC. It sold more than a million copies on its first day of release last year.

Ron Howard, who directed the films based on Brown's earlier novels, has not yet agreed to return for the third movie. Tom Hanks, who played Langdon in 2006's The Da Vinci Code and 2009's Angels and Demons, is also said to be unconvinced about completing the trilogy.

The first two films took $758m (£490m) and $485m respectively at the worldwide box office.</span>

Not surprising. I really wasn't a fan of the book. I'd really love to see Deception Point made into a movie. It's probably my favorite of the books. I'd also take Digital Fortress over The Lost Symbol.

I kind of am: first, that it will be made, second, that Dan Brown is writing the script, that will be a calamity, I expect.

And I find his books utter trash, he just doesn't know how to write.

These books don't translate well into movies. Da Vinci code was a real page turner but part of the appeal were the riddles and puzzles that you could stop reading for a moment and think about what the secret was, or trying to picture these famous paintings in your head and envisioning the brilliant hiding in plain site. With a movie, they can't stop to give me 3 minutes to see if I can go "a ha!" so they just have Tom Hanks solve these puzzles in his head. Well, I can't see inside his head and I don't see that as being as much fun.

Tom Hanks was bad casting.

I liked Deception Point, but it's too Sci-Fi/Geek/Nerdy to translate well on film. If it's dumbed down it could work.

IA that Hanks is a bad choice. For some reason, I always imagined Robert Redford as Langdon (too old, I know).