Sony Want Revamped Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Sequel Rolling By Years End

[Brendon Connelly]

Sony recently suggested that they would push ahead and get going on sequels to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo despite the slow-ish box-office of this first installment. We now have a slightly better idea of what their specific game plan is.

According to Deadline the studio wants to get the second film shooting by around a year from now. There's no talk of a schedule for the third part, but David Fincher has stated clearly that he'd prefer to shoot adaptations of the second and third books back-to-back.

Not that Fincher has been signed to direct. Yet. It seems that the studio still want him, it's likely just a matter of them all working out deals. I'd imagine the two-for-one scheduling would be a point in the negotiations.

Steve Zaillian has already written a draft for The Girl Who Played With Fire, and he's apparently overhauled the novel's structure to bring Lisbeth Salander front and centre.

Despite the title, she's fairly absent in the novel, and that's maybe not such a saleable proposition. Sony seem to be positioning her, as a character, much the way one would a superhero, or James Bond, perhaps. And I've seen it in the audience reactions too, with a great number of fans responding to Salander in particular.

I can't even start to guess what changes Zaillian has made. There were significant alterations between novel and screen last time, and if he's going all out to include Salander, he could well be reshaping from chapter one, and drastically.

There's another change to come on the marketing side. Sony seem to be placing some of the blame for the first film's lukewarm ticket sales on its Christmas release date. What this means for when we'll get to see the next installments is anybody's guess, but I'm thinking the height of summer would be every bit as likely to cause problems.

[tralfaz]

TGWTDT wasn't the only film to suffer this holiday season, all the movies suffered. It seemed like people weren't watching movies this season, at least here in the US

[Jay Kay]

I have read the novel, and...yeah, I can see why they would decide to go that route. A bulk of it is spent either focusing on Blomkvist looking for her or a group of cops looking for her. I can see them deciding to put the cops more to the side and have it just be Salander doing her thing alone with Blomkvist trying to catch up.

[Marine]

Did they make the movie version more likeable? I found the book version to be a nasty little sociopath who everyone inexplicably liked.

[toodoor]

I haven't got round to seeing Dragon yet, I think partly because I enjoyed the Swedish version and so I have no particular urgency. But the sequels are definitely where improvement can be made, they bored the arse off me.

[Molch-R]

I haven't got round to seeing Dragon yet, I think partly because I enjoyed the Swedish version and so I have no particular urgency. But the sequels are definitely where improvement can be made, they bored the arse off me.

IMHO the Fincher version was superior to the Swedish one (not that the latter was bad, it just felt like an extended episode of Wallander). Watched TGWPWF last night and actually got bored - very little sense of drama or endangerment.

[Kinnon]

If they have any concerns over cost/ profit, then they should do what should have been done in the original books and films: strip down the 2nd and 3rd installments into one. There's an inordinate amount of waffle, especially in the middle part, you could literally take 1/3rd of the middle story, combine it to a well pruned 3rd act, and have something really quite strong. As they stand both the books and film lose a lot of momentum and impact and really feel quite badly padded, the courtroom scene's are good enough when it finally comes, but it could've been so much better.

[toodoor]

IMHO the Fincher version was superior to the Swedish one (not that the latter was bad, it just felt like an extended episode of Wallander). Watched TGWPWF last night and actually got bored - very little sense of drama or endangerment.

I fell asleep during one of the last two. Which was a bit embarrassing as I had a mate round watching it with me. We watched the rest another night. They just become so self involved and talky, it's very dull. And the last one just constantly felt like something was about to happen but never actually did.

[BigBlack]

Odd. The books weren't boring at all.

I suppose a price must be paid for deciding to watch a flashy synopsis of written works that are hundreds and hundreds of pages long, instead of actually reading the books themselves. The irritating part for fans of this or any other written series is how many internet posts speak in tones as if the various film adaptations' pacing and character focus are problems inherent to the original novels themselves, which is utterly false. My point is that I wish more people would read books, and that more films were written as original film works, rather than abridged versions of much deeper reading experiences. Of course then, no one would be able to cash in on brand name recognition, and we'd need more of that elusive originality stuff.