Rooney Mara Heading To David Fincher’s Utopia

After helping to launch her career in 2011’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, director David Fincher is moving to reteam with Oscar nominee Rooney Mara on his HBO series Utopia (not to be confused with the very short-lived Fox reality series).

Helmed by Fincher and written by novelist Gillian Flynn as the pair’s second collaboration after last year’s chilling thriller Gone Girl (which Flynn scripted working from her own bestseller), Utopia is a remake of the British series of the same name.

Its plot is complex but it initially focuses on a group of people fascinated by a cult graphic novel called The Utopia Experiments, which has predicted some of the world’s most cataclysmic disasters. Suddenly hunted by a nefarious organization, the group attempts to get ahold of the graphic novel long enough to figure out where the next disaster will take place.

TheWrap‘s Jeff Sneider broke word of Mara’s involvement over Twitter yesterday, so there’s no word yet on which character the actress will play. Regardless, news of her collaborating with Fincher is incredibly exciting – Mara’s committed performance as abused hacker Lisbeth Salander in Fincher’s Dragon Tattoo remake was one of the best things about the pic.

That Utopia is casting up suggests Fincher is turning his attention there after HBO shockingly shut down production on his music-video world comedy Videosynchrazy (working title) over script issues. That must be frustrating for the director, but Utopia certainly seems like the more interesting show, so it should be terrific to watch him fill it up with top-tier talent.

Here’s the synopsis:

The die-hard fans of an iconic, underground graphic novel are suddenly launched into their own pop-culture thriller when they learn that the author has secretly written a sequel. Unfortunately, the new manuscript is much more than just a book and those on the hunt for it suddenly find themselves in a game of shifting loyalties, conspiracy and shocking twists as the true meaning of the book is slowly revealed.