'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' Sequels Are Still in the Cards

Tuesday, 03 January 2012 09:58 Written by Jordan DeSaulnier

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'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' Sequels Are Still in the Cards

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is now in theaters, and it's the first big, studio-backed American adaptation of an international bestseller by the late Stieg Larsson. Naturally, Sony Pictures planned the film as the starting point for cinematic adaptations of all three novels in Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, but in the two weeks since The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo hit theaters, the film has, fairly or not, been carrying the faint whiff of commercial disappointment. Despite that perception, the studio intends to go ahead with The Girl Who Played With Fire and trilogy-capper The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

An impressive and unique marketing effort, along with the ridiculous popularity of the books and the involvement of director David Fincher, led to high expectations for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The film, budgeted at $90 million, has been in theaters for two weeks to the day and has earned $55.8 million so far and the R-rated feature currently sits just behind family-friendly Alvin and the Chipmunks: ChipWrecked in the box office rankings.

[Dragon Tattoo] continues to do strong business and nothing has changed with respect to development of the next book,” a Sony representative informed Entertainment Weekly. In November, Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal made it known that The Girl Who Played With Fire was already in development, with Steve Zaillian at work on the sequel script. A late 2013 release is being aimed at, with the assumption being that, like its predecessor, it will drop around Christmas time.

Zaillian, the Oscar-winner who wrote Schindler's List, Awakenings, and American Gangster, also adapted the first novel in exceedingly faithful fashion. The second novel finds vengeful, borderline-autistic hacker and investigator Lisbeth Salander framed for the murder of two journalists behind a sex-trafficking expose. The third is arguably the least Lisbeth-oriented of the novels, focusing more on Mikael Blomkvist's efforts to clear her name.

Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig are both signed up for two more turns as Salander and Blomkvist, but Fincher has not yet committed to return for more. The director has previously said that if he does continue, he would want to shoot The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest back-to-back, largely to save Mara from having to bleach her eyebrows and wallow in depravity for two separate productions. Part of the first film's allure for Fincher was the notion of being let loose on an R-rated, adult-oriented studio franchise, which would seem to indicate a desire to stick around. Still, Fincher doesn't generally make the move you'd expect, so we'll just have to wait and see.