The buzziest book of 2008 is still relevant, or at least Hollywood executives hope it is. Per Variety, Amazon is developing a new Lisbeth Salander television series in celebration of The Girl In The Spider Web’s fifth anniversary. Though the report didn’t say specifically which of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium trilogy” the series will focus on, Amazon MGM did select an appropriate showrunner: Veena Sud, who brought The Killing stateside.
Larsson died in 2004, but the Salander books continued. After his death, David Lagercrantz wrote several more Salander mysteries, including the aforementioned Spider’s Web. The latest, written by another new author, Karin Smirnoff, came out in 2022. However, though the books have sold more than 100 million copies, dragon tattoos never became the phenomenon Hollywood hoped for. Fincher’s series died in development after the release of Dragon Tattoo and Spider’s Web died at the box office.
There is a sense that Hollywood fumbled the bag with this one. Despite being pegged early as a bomb, Fincher’s Girl With The Dragon Tattoo grossed more than $100 million and was nominated for five Oscars, winning one for editing. Rooney Mara snagged her first nomination for the movie and was presumably expected to return until the sequels seemingly fizzled out. Seven years and one new Salander (this time Claire Foy) later, audiences had moved on from Dragon Tattoos to Sherlock Gnomes, another 2018 mystery, which grossed $97 million to Spider Web’s $34 million.
While Americans might have an on-again-off-again relationship with Lisbeth Salander, Larsson’s trilogy still had a massive effect. The books helped popularize Nordic noir procedurals around the world, inspiring The Killing and The Bridge, among others. Sud’s work on the first two seasons of The Killing certainly shows a knack for snowy investigations and adaptations. Like Dragon Tattoo, The Killing was based on the Danish series Forbrydelsen.