Just looking at the box-office numbers it wouldn’t take a seasoned veteran to realize David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is under-performing considering the rumored $90 million budget and the $60 million it has earned so far. However, with an A CinemaScore from audiences, an 85% at RottenTomatoes and an 8.3/10 rating from IMDb users so far, it would seem a sequel may not be all that bad an idea considering people will also still have time to find the film on Blu-ray and DVD which would mean for much larger potential for the sequel. Not to forget, foreign market totals have just started trickling in where it has made just over $12 million so far.
As far as Columbia moving forward with the second film in Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy,” The Girl Who Played with Fire, a spokesman was quoting telling Entertainment Weekly that “development continues” on the sequel and Tattoo screenwriter Steven Zaillian is still working on the script as planned with a targeted late-2013 release date.
Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig are already signed to return as Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist respectively, but it is not yet known as to whether David Fincher will return to direct.
When recently interviewed by The Playlist, Fincher discussed the possibility of a sequel saying The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (the third and final book in the trilogy) “are very much one story and it doesn’t seem prudent to me to go to Sweden for a year and then come back for a year, put out the second [film], go back to Sweden for a year, come back for a year.”
Fincher makes it sound as if he would prefer to turn it all into one film as opposed to shooting two, an idea that goes against current studio attempts to turn the final book in popular franchises into two-parters a la Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Twilight: Breaking Dawn.
As to whether he would return to direct, he was coy adding, “I would be happy for everyone involved as that would mean a lot of people went to see it and enjoyed it. Do I need to see a sequel? No, there’s a little bit of an emotional cliffhanger at the end, but the story is complete.”
So perhaps we can look forward to the return of Lisbeth Salander, but just who exactly should Columbia get to direct if Fincher doesn’t decide to return? Speculate on that in the comments below, but first…
In other sequel news, Paramount Pictures issued a press release over the weekend celebrating the record $5.17 billion the studio made worldwide in 2011 and inside included a little nugget regarding Paranormal Activity 4, of which we already assumed would be made after Paranormal Activity 3 made over $103 million on a reported $5 million budget.
Inside the release it included the following paragraph regarding the studio’s 2012 slate:
In 2012, Paramount’s release slate highlights include World War Z, a zombie thriller starring Brad Pitt and directed by Marc Forster, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, the next installment in the global franchise starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Channing Tatum, a new chapter in the Paranormal Activity franchise, and The Dictator, starring Sacha Baron Cohen and directed by Larry Charles, the team behind Borat.
I had already penciled Paranormal Activity 4 in for an October 2012 release so this is no surprise to me. On top of that, considering the response my recap of the franchise so far received, I think the studio is making the right move.
