Six years after David Fincher’s gritty film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was released, Sony announced that the Lisbeth Salander series will be rebooted: A fresh film installment, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, will be released in 2018. At a London Book Fair event, the studio said that production for the reboot will begin in September, with a release date planned for October 5, 2018, according to BuzzFeed. This new movie won’t feature any of the original movie’s players — no Fincher, Rooney Mara, or Daniel Craig — and will be directed by Fede Alvarez.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was a relative success for Sony when it was released in 2011. Talks for the follow-up stalled for two reasons: The series’ second book, The Girl Who Played With Fire, focused on a complicated conspiracy that was hard to adapt, and the Fincher-Mara-Craig trio was too costly for Sony, which was trying to cut down the trilogy’s cost. The reboot will focus on a book in Larsson’s Swedish Millennium trilogy written by David Lagercrantz, who took over writing Salander’s stories after Larsson’s death in 2004. The Girl in the Spider’s Web will use an “entirely new cast,†according to BuzzFeed. Instead of using Mara — who has said in the past that she’d be down to return, despite rumors she was being replaced by Alicia Vikander (Vikander reportedly has since passed on the role) — the reboot is doing a “global search†to find a new star. “Lisbeth Salander is the kind of character any director dreams of bringing to life,†Alvarez wrote to BuzzFeed in a statement. “We’ve got a great script and now comes the most fun part — finding our Lisbeth.â€