You know the modern Hollywood, I.P.-hungry adage: “if at first you don’t succeed and your wholesale reboot also fails, try, try again as a series.” Or maybe it’s, those who can, do; those who can’t, do it on Television.” Whatever the case may be, with the golden era of Streaming Age in full swing right now, the trend of turning your movie franchise into a series—and not letting that intellectual property you own idle—gone into overdrive in the last 18 months. The latest project, going from the big screen to the little one, is “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo“—the Millennium trilogy of crime novels starring the protagonist Lisbeth Salander from the late author Stieg Larsson. The books have sold more than 100 million copies combined worldwide, Larsson passed away in 2005 after a sudden heart attack.
However, this version of the franchise won’t pull from Larson’s book, or any subsequent sequels published without him. Instead, follow the Salander character and “place her in today’s world with a wholly new setting, new characters, and a new story,” according to Variety.
The project, which is currently titled “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, doesn’t have any creatives or talent attached to it yet. Andy Harries, a producer of the series “The Night Manager” and “Wild at Heart” and founder and CEO of Left Bank Pictures, will executive produce along with Rob Bullock. Amazon Studios and Left Bank will produce in association with Sony Pictures Television.
Two film adaptations of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” were made by Sony Pictures, including the 2011 version from David Fincher, an ambitious and hard-R version starring Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig. While popular, it was expensive, and the economics didn’t serve in its favor. Despite work on a sequel, it never materialized, and Sony decided to go in another direction with 2018’s “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” with director Fede Álvarez and star Claire Foy, but it failed to catch much traction critically or at the box office. Before that, the series was popularized in Sweden with the 2009 trilogy that turned Naomi Rapace into an international star and on Hollywood’s radar.
READ MORE: Rooney Mara Says She’s “Not Holding Out Hope Any More” For A ‘Dragon Tattoo’ Sequel
It would be difficult to put ‘Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ into the damaged goods category yet, and the detective-like nature of the stories would work well on TV. Still, in the interest of salvaging this series and removing the blemishes it received of late, Sony and Amazon would do best to try and find some real writer/director/showrunner talent to lead this one. Time will tell. [Variety]