The film distributor also says the planned release date for the Ron Howard-directed religious thriller, originally set to open in 2008, has been pushed back to 2009.

"With the strike nearing its third week, Columbia Pictures has postponed production of Angels and Demons," the studio said in a statement, adding that the script by Oscar-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldman needed further work.

Goldman, a member of the Writers Guild of America (WGA), is barred by the WGA's strike rules from editing or polishing scripts for the duration of the walkout.

In addition to his work on The Da Vinci Code, Goldman's writing credits include boxing drama Cinderella Man and A Beautiful Mind, for which he won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.

"While the film-makers and the studio feel the screenplay is very strong, we do not believe it is the fully realised production draft required of this ambitious project," Columbia said.

"At this time, there is no new start date, but we are setting a release date of May 15, 2009."

Sticking point

The WGA went on strike against major film and TV studios on November 5 after negotiations on a new contract for its 12,000 members reached an impasse.

The union is seeking higher fees from internet revenues for writers.

The strike immediately threw the television industry into disarray. Work on numerous late night talk shows and prime-time comedies and dramas ground to a halt.

Angels and Demons marks the first major Hollywood film set for release in 2008 to be delayed by the walkout.

Columbia says it does not expect the strike to affect any other film in its 2008 slate, which also includes the next James Bond film, a Will Smith action drama titled Hancock or the Adam Sandler comedy You Don't Mess with Zohan.

Prequel

Angels and Demons is being adapted from the best-selling book of the same name by author Dan Brown.

Published in 2000, it was Brown's first novel to introduce the character of Robert Langdon - the crime-solving Harvard professor of iconography and religious art played by actor Tom Hanks in the big screen adaptation of The Da Vinci Code.

Hanks is on board to return as Langdon for Angels and Demons, which the studio optioned as part of its 2003 acquisition of film rights to Brown's Code.

Despite receiving mainly negative reviews after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2006, The Da Vinci Code went on to tally more than $US753 million at the box office worldwide.

That film, like the book, teamed up Langdon with a young French cryptologist to solve a murder entwined with the works of Leonardo Da Vinci and a supposed alternate history of Christianity.

A central premise of the story was that Jesus fathered a child by Mary Magdalene, and that a clandestine society has for centuries protected the identity of Christ's living descendants from agents of the Catholic Church.

In Angels, another murder investigation leads Langdon on a quest to thwart a plot by an ancient group, the Illuminati, to blow up the Vatican during a papal conclave. © 2007 Australian Broadcasting Corporation