Ron Howard is getting ready for a hell of a year. Thanks to the pending writer’s strike, the director is scrambling to get moving on the sequel to The Da Vinci Code, with a hope to get the next Robert Langdon mystery filming by February. This move comes on the heels of Howard’s work on Frost/Nixon, an adaptation of the acclaimed Broadway play which wrapped filming last week. This means Howard will be putting in post-production work on one picture while shooting a second one, according to Variety.

To add to the complexity of Howard’s situation, both Angels & Demons and Frost/Nixon are slated for later 2008 releases, which means the director is going to be very busy. I can’t help but wonder how that might impact the quality of both films. It just doesn’t seem feasibly possible that Howard can put his best efforts into two films simultaneously, even if one is in post while the other is filming. To be fair, I didn’t think The Da Vinci Code was Howard’s best work in the first place, so maybe a lackluster sequel would be appropriate.

If anything, this is another reason to worry about the pending strikes. So many deals are being completed in an effort to beat deadlines and many of them may not be in the best interests of the stories or even the audience. As Variety points out though, Howard isn’t the first director to throw himself into two projects on a tight turnaround. Spielberg did the same with Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List and Clint Eastwood did the same last year with Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Both of those yielded some serious results, both critically and commercially, so perhaps this could succeed.