Six years after The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was released in 2011, Sony is finally getting around to making a sequel to David Fincher’s chilly crime thriller, itself a remake of the first in a popular Swedish film trilogy. According to Variety, the studio has set sequel The Girl In The Spider’s Web for October 2018, with Don’t Breathe’s Fede Alvarez confirmed in the director’s chair. Rooney Mara, who scored her first Oscar nomination for her role as Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s 2011 movie, won’t be back for the sequel, though, and neither will her co-star Daniel Craig—or anyone from the cast from the first film, for that matter.
That might be interpreted as a bad sign, but if anyone can reinvent the series, it’s Alvarez. Not only does he have a “talent and skill in creating psychological intensity,” as Columbia Pictures president Sanford Panitch puts it, but he started his career directing a long-after-the-fact remake of The Evil Dead that asserted its individuality through its intensity. He’s done this before, in other words.