The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Sequel Just Got Very Confusing.

I thoroughly enjoyed David Fincher’s 2011 adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s best selling crime novel The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and according to its box office receipts, ($236m against a $90m budget), a lot of other people did too. But Sony considered the film a bit of a flop and four years have passed with no mention of a sequel, until now.

Of course, the most obvious step would be to adapt the second novel in Larsson’s trilogy The Girl Who Played With Fire, as a direct continuation of the story, but this is Hollywood we’re dealing with.

Apparently Sony now want to by-pass both the sequel book and the third novel in the series The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest and pick up the story with the fourth book The Girl In The Spider’s Web and if that wasn’t confusing enough Rooney Mara, who played the lead protagonist Lisbeth Salander in the original movie, will not be reprising her role and there’s serious doubt over Daniel’s Craig return as investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, due to budgetary constraints.

So to re-cap the sequel will now take place two whole books later in the series without the main actors returning as the cast and no David Fincher as director. So what’s the point? Well, Sony believe there’s life in the franchise and they’re not too bothered shooting adaptations of the books out of order, similar to how the James Bond films were shot. They believe in the franchise that much that they’ve hired screenwriter Steven Knight to pen the script and forked out a rumoured seven figure fee for an adaptation of The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Steven Zaillian. That’s right, they’re already working on the script for the natural sequel to Dragon Tattoo but they want to make the fourth book the first sequel.

Rumours online indicate that actress  Alicia Vikander is currently the leading candidate to be the new Lisbeth Salander.