An acclaimed Oscar-nominated box office smash getting an unrelated prequel instead of a sequel is still boggling minds

On paper, a critically-acclaimed thriller hailing from one of the best directors in the business that earned nearly $240 million at the box office and landed five Academy Award nominations would be a shoo-in for the sequels that were already planned ahead of time, but that didn’t turn out to be the case for David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Shortly after the film’s initial release, Fincher confirmed he was planning to shoot The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest back-to-back with eyes on the second chapter coming to theaters in 2013. The filmmaker remained confident in the face of several delays, but in late 2015 it was instead revealed that soft reboot The Girl in the Spider’s Web was in the works.

To the shock of very few people, the reinvention was derided by critics and audiences alike in becoming the worst of the five features to have starred Lisbeth Salander, and it flopped at the box office for good measure after failing to even recoup its $43 million budget – which was less than half of what Fincher’s flick cost to make.

It’s been over a decade since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo became one cinema’s most egregious one-and-done failed franchises, and yet the denizens of social media are still struggling to wrap their heads around what became of the property.

If you boil The Girl in the Spider’s Web down to its essence, then it’s the reboot of a remake of a trilogy that was adapted from a literary series, which is milking a property for all it’s worth in a nutshell. There were doubts that anyone would even be interested in seeing another Lisbeth outing minus Fincher and Oscar-nominated Rooney Mara, and those concerns turned out to be right on the money.