Whether you consider this “news” or simply confirmation of what most already assumed to be true, E! Online reported over the weekend that the much-mired sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is more or less dead in the icy Nordic waters. Their source? The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo herself, star Rooney Mara.
Mara — Oscar-nominated for her role as the compelling and beautifully complex ward-of-the-state, social outcast, and genius hacker Lisbeth Salander — told E! last week, “I don’t think it’s going to happen. I’m sad never to do it again, but it just doesn’t seem like it’s in the cards.” The idea of a sequel has been kicked around plenty over the last three years, but with the first film underperforming at the box office and the franchise’s returns likely diminishing with each passing day, I can’t say the news comes as a surprise.
So alas, after much sitting and waiting and wishing, it seems we won’t see this girl play with fire or kick the hornet’s nest after all, and even though a large majority likely saw such news as inevitable, it’s still a sad situation if you ask me. Mara brought so much depth to the role, and if we are talking about this purely from a story perspective, the threads that weave through both “The Girl Who Played with Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” are superior to the ones contained in Stieg Larsson‘s first entry in his “Millenium Trilogy”.
Director David Fincher made a tight, lean film out of an often-meandering book, and unfortunately it appears I can only dream about what he might have done with what I consider to be vastly superior source material. Who knows if the property will get rebooted or if Sony will return to it down the road, as it spent a pretty penny to option the series, but if that happens it’ll now almost assuredly be in very different hands. Le sigh.
