Tom Hanks has apparently been invited to switch the Large Hadron Collider back on at the Cern laboratory as part of a promotional stunt for Angels & Demons.

You’ll likely remember that the Collider – a particle accelerator designed to help unravel some of the universe’s biggest physics mysteries – had to be shut down due to… er… faulty wiring last year.

And given that part of Angels’ plot involves someone out to destroy the Vatican with antimatter pinched from Cern, it must have seemed logical to someone.

According to the Telegraph, the scientists have assured us all that the Collider won’t create black holes likely to suck the Earth and anything close by to its doom, but how do we know Tom Hanks won’t end the world?

Which got us to thinking about some dodgy movie stunts of the past – the ones that created more grief than glee and never helped at the box office…


1. News Blast

The Film: Mission Impossible III

The Big Idea: Hidden digital music players inside LA newspaper dispensing boxes would play the theme tune when a punter opens it to get their copy.

The Result: A few of the boxes jarred loose, and dropped on to the papers. Users saw a suspicious device with wires jutting out and leaped straight to the wrong conclusion.

At least one of the boxes was exploderised by the LAPD bomb squad. If only they’d done that to Oprah’s couch when Cruise got jumpy.