It certainly has meant “print more books.” Now it also means “print movie tickets, paperbacks, store displays, posters.”

Dan Brown’s controversial thriller about a murdered art curator and a centuries-old Vatican conspiracy is going to generate heaps of paper in the next two months. And a lot of it will be green.

In the U.S., “The Da Vinci Code’’ was released Tuesday in a 5 million-paperback run. In comparison, Harry Potter novels were released in softcover printings of 2 million or so.

Brown’s novel is already the best-selling adult novel in hardcover — ever. It has sold 12 million copies in the U.S. alone, more than 43 million copies worldwide.

It has inspired books of criticism against it, as well as its own faddish genre of thrillers that draw on historic frauds or legends.

And the Ron Howard-Tom Hanks film adaptation doesn’t open in the U.S. until May 19. The movie provides a “launch opportunity,” for the paperback, as publicists say. The film cost $125 million to make, and Newsweek has declared that it’s arriving with more fanfare than sequels to the “X-Men’’ and “Pirates of the Caribbean.’’

Two paperbacks are available, one for $14.95 and one at $7.99. And it’s hardly surprising that a third, “The Da Vinci Code Illustrated Screenplay,’’ is set for release the day the movie opens.

As ever-present as “The Da Vinci Code’’ has seemed, it will soon be close to inescapable.

Easter is coming in three weeks. The last time a Hollywood movie stirred this kind of debate about heresy and history, it was “The Passion of the Christ.’’

But Mel Gibson’s film wasn’t released with a copyright lawsuit getting headlines, three new paperback editions with a widespread marketing campaign, a hardcover book still on the best-seller list and evangelical and Catholic scholars already responding with their own books, DVDs, Web sites and TV programming.

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