He may be flirting with going for a deep-sea dive with “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea,” but a New York Times article on the aftermath of the death of Swedish author Stieg Larsson seems to have confirmed what we’ve known for a while; that David Fincher’s next film will indeed be an adaptation of the author’s bestselling thriller “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.”
Reports came in earlier this month that Fincher was scouting locations in Sweden, and the Times has now confirmed that the film’s release date is set for December 2011, which would seem to suggest a start in October, as we’ve reported all along. It’s interesting that this film is set for the awards season slot that was denied to Fincher’s “Zodiac,” and as it’ll be twenty years since the Oscar success of “The Silence of the Lambs,” might Sony be hoping to repeat the awards run of that serial killer picture? Certainly, they wouldn’t mind even a small taste of the thirteen nominations and three wins Fincher received at the Academy Awards for his last picture, “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.”
The same article also suggests that the second and third films of Larsson’s trilogy, “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest,” will be filmed together at some point in the future (probably depending on the success on the first installment), although it’s unclear exactly when, or if Fincher would still be attached — we do know that he has an option to direct the second, but we can’t see him sticking around to do the whole trilogy.
We enjoyed the books, for what they were, and we’ve got full confidence that Fincher can easily top the truly terrible Swedish adaptations, which managed to pretty much disregard the parts of the novels that worked, while keeping the silliest. There’s no confirmation of any casting at this point, either of Brad Pitt or of any of the legion of actresses (Carey Mulligan, Ellen Page, Anne Hathaway etc) linked to the key role of semi-autistic computer hacker Lisbeth Salander.