Back in 2011, Sony Pictures released director David Fincher’s American adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo with Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander and Daniel Craig as investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist. But when the film wasn’t the huge hit that Sony had been expecting, the adaptations of Larsson’s remaining Lisbeth Salander novels stalled.

Today, a new report indicates that Sony is going to make another attempt to turn Lisbeth and Mikael into franchise characters by skipping over The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest and adapting the fourth novel in the series, The Girl in the Spider’s Web. Both Mara and Fincher are out of the sequel, while Craig would have reportedly returned if his rate had been increased for the second movie. However, the studio is rumored to have a mandate to produce The Girl in the Spider’s Web on a lower budget than the $90 million Fincher had to adapt The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Steven Knight (Burnt) has already been hired to write the script for The Girl in the Spider’s Web. A release date has not been announced. According to The Wrap, Alicia Vikander is currently the leading candidate to be the new Lisbeth Salander. Vikander has previously appeared in The Danish Girl, Anna Karenina, A Royal Affair, and Testament of Youth.

This jump to the series fourth novel may leave book fans particularly unhappy, since The Girl in the Spider’s Web, was written by David Lagercrantz after Larsson’s death. The film also risks missing several steps in the development of the main characters, but the report indicates that The Girl Who Played With Fire could still be made into a film, as Sony has already invested a “mid-seven figures” writing fee for Steven Zaillian’s adaptation of that script.

There is some precedent for adapting a novel series out of order. The James Bond films were famously adapted from Ian Fleming’s original books in a seemingly random order. More recently, the cinematic adaptations of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon novels have also shuffled the novels’ order.

How do you feel about the upcoming recastings for The Girl in the Spider’s Web? And who should be the new Lisbeth Salander? Hack your way into our comments section below!

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HT: The Hollywood Reporter
Image Credit: Sony Pictures