The Girl In The Spider’s Web Won’t Really Be A Sequel, Says Steven Knight

It’s been a long and winding road for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo franchise over here in North America. Though David Fincher’s film was compelling and full of strong performances, it didn’t really do much for audiences and despite grossing $232.6 million worldwide, the planned sequel was put on hold.

With Fincher having butted heads with the studio during production, and making it clear in recent years that he wasn’t too eager to return, it seemed like the franchise might be dead, with interest in the properly quickly dwindling the longer it took Sony to make a decision.

Just when all hope seemed lost, however, it was announced that the studio would be bringing us more of Lisbeth Salander, but not in the manner that most people expected. That’s because instead of adapting the next novel in the trilogy, The Girl who Played with Fire, they’ll be continuing the story with The Girl in the Spider’s Web, with Fede Alvarez being eyed to helm the pic.

For those unfamiliar with the source material, Spider’s Web is actually the fourth book in the series, and wasn’t written by the author of the original trilogy, Stieg Larsson. As such, it definitely feels like more of a standalone story, rather than a continuation of the first three outings. It’s a curious move on Sony’s part to be heading in this direction, and with rumors that Rooney Mara may not even return to reprise the lead role, we’re left with no clue as to what to expect from the film.

Hoping to clear that up is Collider, who sat down with writer Steven Knight over the weekend at the Allied press junket to try and squeeze a few details out of him in regards to his involvement in scripting Spider’s Web. Unfortunately, he couldn’t really say a whole lot, but he did mention that we shouldn’t expect it to operate as a sequel to Dragon Tattoo:

“It can be anything other than a sequel, but a couple of books have been skipped, so it is different, in that sense. It’s really taking a very strong central character and thinking, how do you execute this? It’s quite different.”

It’s still early days on the film, so details are understandably scarce. However, interest in the property is already far from what it used to be, and if Sony doesn’t even plan on bringing Rooney Mara back and instead chooses to reboot things, we’re not sure too many people out there will even care to see The Girl in the Spider’s Web.

Why the studio chose to go this route over just adapting Played with Fire is unfortunately something we’ll probably never really know the answer to, but as of now, we can’t say we’re too optimistic about this one.