Prior to the release of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Sony Pictures was looking quite bullish about a trilogy of films based on the bestselling Millennium Trilogy by the late the late Swedish novelist and journalist Stieg Larsson.  Director David Fincher's adaptation of the first book dropped well over a year ago and progress on the sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire, has been slower than anticipated.

So what gives?

Impossibly cheekboned starBrad Pitt is the closest thing David Fincher has to a muse, having starred for the perfectionist director in Se7en, Fight Club, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Now, Fincher is eager to get Pitt playing one of the lead roles in a big-budget 3D update of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, provided Disney actually decides to make the movie.

Sony Pictures has made no bones about its intention to adapt the entirety of the late Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium Trilogy, starting with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  That film is performing reasonably well in theaters right now, and the studio is continuing development on the first sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire, though it's unknown whether or not director David Fincher will return.  Given the obvious franchise intentions, it's no surprise that the opening title sequence for the first film visually incorporates moments from all three novels.

That title sequence strongly recalls some of Fincher's distinctive work as a director of both commercials and music videos, as well as (to a lesser extent) the titles to his 1995 thriller Se7en.  The titles feature a cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" by composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, along with Yeah Yeah Yeahs lead singer Karen O, and its a testament hypnotic, at times assaultive style that the song doesn't simply overwhelm the visual presentation.

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.

The American adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has yet to actually hit theaters, but Sony's marketing and David Fincher's flair for the iconic have already made the film's central figures and its overall somber tone instantly recognizable.  As such, the yet-to-be-released thriller is ripe for parody, and the good folks at Funny or Die have obliged with a spoof trailer for a nonexistent movie entitled The Girl With the Tramp Stamp Tattoo.

Standing for Lisbeth Salander, the resilient, borderline autistic title character* in Stieg Larsson's novel is a vacuous, texting party girl clad in Juicy Couture and making references to "the Jager shits."  Emma Roberts plays the Vespa-riding investigator, a boozy contemporary of Lisbeth, played in the feature by Rooney Mara.  And standing in for improbably handsome Michael Blomkvist Daniel Craig is none other than Joe Manganiello, familiar to fans of True Blood and How I Met Your Mother.  Oh hey, and there's deadpan comedy expert Ray Wise filling the role played by Christopher Plummer in Fincher's film.

Like a griffin preparing to descend upon us spitting golden awesome, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is mere weeks from hitting theaters.  While this is good because it means we'll be able to see David Fincher's take on the jet black bestseller by Stieg Larsson, it's bad because it means that Sony Pictures' incredible marketing campaign will finally be over.  Before the end, though, Sony has gone ahead and dropped a full eight-minute preview of the film.  This would be the same super-extended trailer that Sony showed to select audiences a few months back.  So if you want to watch almost ten minutes of the new film from the man behind Fight Club, Zodiac, Se7en, The Game, Panic Room, and The Social Network, you are free to do so.  Not only that, but Oscar-winning The Social Network composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have dropped details of preorders on the basic score, a mega-deluxe edition, and a half hour-plus preview of the huge, atmospheric score.

The last two films from director David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Social Network, both became heavy hitters during the always-ridiculous awards season (the latter moreso than the former).  Since that last film arguably represented a critical high water mark for the auteur behind Seven, Fight Club, and Zodiac, there are already some expectation that The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo will have a similar presence, but today Fincher himself is sharing his thoughts on exactly why that isn't likely to be happening.  Not only that, but as a bonus, we have a couple of new images from the adaptation of the late Stieg Larsson's bestselling novel, one featuring Daniel Craig as the beleaguered journalist Mikael Blomkvist and two with Rooney Mara as the titular hacker and badass.

There's a new extended TV spot for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo making the rounds, and it focuses squarely on the title character, the hacker and investigator Lisbeth Salander, played here by Rooney Mara.  It also features quite a bit of new footage and, as with so much of the marketing for this film, is quite a little piece of work, opening and closing on two wryly observed character beats that tell us so much about the enigmatic character.  The earliest trailers and whatnot treated Lisbeth like Bigfoot, being seen only briefly and allowing Daniel Craig's Michael Blomkvist to drive things.  But now Lisbeth is taking center stage, and David Fincher's take on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo looks to offer a unique version of this strange, damaged person that can exist separately from the Lisbeth played by Noomi Rapace in the Swedish films.

Every superhero blockbuster is accompanied by sundry toys, t-shirts, hoodies, and underpants bearing the recognizable symbol of that hero.  Lisbeth Salander, the title character in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is doing Green Lantern and Spider-Man one better though, as she's inspired a new line of clothing from H&M to tie in with the new film adaptation from director David Fincher.  That's right, the clothing retailer known for its low-cost, fashionable offerings is the home to a bunch of clothes based on the style sported by Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, a borderline-autistic, brilliant hacker and survivor of rape and misogynistic abuse who crowd-pleasingly gains violent retribution against men who hate women.

Given the global popularity of the novel by Stieg Larsson, the marketing for the upcoming adaptation The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo could probably consist of some dudes wearing sandwich board signs saying "David Fincher made a new version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and the movie would probably still do really well.  Sony has not gone that route, however, and the marketing for this film has been appropriately stylish, unique, and generally just really cool.  Another new poster, for example, doesn't just put the standard floating heads above a title, but interestingly presents Rooney Mara's Lisbeth Salander and Daniel Craig's Mikael Blomkvist with an arresting graphic approach and the fairly ominous tagline, "What Was Hidden in the Snow Comes Forth in the Thaw."