The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: David Fincher reflects on his “swing and a miss”

Last Updated on June 22, 2023

If all went according to plan, David Fincher was all set to follow his English-language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. However, those sequel plans were cancelled when the movie didn’t generate the return the studio wanted.

David Fincher reflected on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo while speaking at the Tribeca Film Festival (via Entertainment Weekly), calling it a “swing and a miss.” Despite not getting to complete the trilogy, Fincher remains very “proud” of the first movie. “We did it the way that we could,” Fincher said. “And when people said it cost too much for what the return on investment was, I said, ‘Okay, swing and a miss.’“

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had a budget of $90 million and went on to gross $232 million worldwide. Sure, it’s not the biggest box-office success, but I feel like sequels have been greenlit with less. The film wound up being more expensive than it probably needed to be as David Fincher wanted to stay true to the novel’s Swedish origins. “We had pledged early on that we wanted to make a movie that was not embarrassing to its Swedish heritage,” Fincher said. “They said, ‘Well, can you shoot it in Atlanta?’ I was like, ‘Well, no. Atlanta for Sweden? I don’t know.’ We wanted it to be true to its essence. You shoot in Sweden, you’re shooting for eight or nine-hour days, if you’re lucky. And so the movie took 140 days to shoot. I was proud of it. I thought we did what we set out to do.“

Although we never got the David Fincher sequels, the franchise did eventually return with The Girl in the Spider’s Web which served as a soft reboot. Claire Foy replaced Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, with Sverrir Gudnason replacing Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist. The film was a genuine box-office disappointment and received mixed reviews.

Amazon was said to be working on a TV series centered around Lisbeth Salander, but it’s been a while since we last heard about the project. The series wasn’t going to be a sequel or continuation of the story from the books or films, but would have placed Salander in “today’s world with a wholly new setting, new characters, and a new story.“