Despite making $233 million on a $90 million budget, David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has been deemed too expensive to warrant a proper sequel. Instead, The Hollywood Reporter says Sony is planning to reboot the movies by skipping a few of the books in the series and jumping ahead to the fourth, The Girl In The Spider’s Web, which was written by David Lagercrantz after original author Stieg Larsson died in 2004. This reboot is being positioned as a significantly lower-budget project, and Fincher and original stars Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara (who earned an Oscar nomination for her performance) will not return. Burnt’s Steven Knight is “in early talks” to write the adaptation of Spider’s Web.
THR also notes that Sony has already paid a lot of money for a draft of the actual Dragon Tattoo sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire, so it sounds like the plan would be to film a (cheap) adaptation of that once Spider’s Web is done, assuming that one makes money.