The 2010s saw a major resurgence in bestselling book series getting major movie adaptations. Thanks to the unprecedented success of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings films, or even smaller examples like Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter saga, authors from all over the world quickly became an inexhaustible resource for inspiring the next wave of Hollywood directors to make blockbuster films with smarts, depth, and plenty of extensive lore to draw on for multiple films.
While Young Adult fiction certainly had a big run with films like The Twilight Saga, The Maze Runner, Divergent, and many others, the crime-drama fiction also got a shot at box office glory, and one franchise stepped up to fill the void left by Thomas Harris’s works. Now, that franchise is coming back in a bold new reboot, with some even bolder lead casting that’s immediately creating major buzz (and not all of it good).
It’s been announced that David Oyelowo (Selma) will play journalist Mikael Blomkvist, one of the main protagonists of the Dragon Tattoo series (or Millennium book series ) by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. Actress Viola Prettejohn (The Crown, Generation Z) has been cast as Lisbeth Salander, the hacker/investigator (and titular girl with the dragon tattoo) who teams with Mikael on a serial-killing cold case that is rooted in the darkest ends of Sweden’s culture and past. The novel is being developed into a new TV series at Sky, with an all-star creative team behind it.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo novel has been adapted to film twice: A Swedish version in 2009, starring Michael Nyqvist (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) and Noomi Rapace (Prometheus) as Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander. It became a cult hit; the two sequel books were also adapted and released in the same year, and later the trilogy was expanded into a Millenium TV series. David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en) directed the 2011 American remake, with Daniel Craig (James Bond) and Rooney Mara (The Social Network) as the leads.
…It goes without saying that Oyelowo’s casting will be a point of controversy for a lot of fans of the source material. While there is a population of Afro-Swedes who have existed for centuries, it’s clearly not the image the country is famous for, or the character that Larsson described in the original text. That said, Mikael Blomkvist’s story in the first Dragon Tattoo book is a complicated tale of public professional disgrace, some complicated romantic entanglements, and an investigation into a prominent Swedish family whose members include more than one Nazi. Making Mikael a black character clearly opens up wild new ranges of meaning and implication.
The internet is sure to have an opinion on all this, with some early insights being… already too harsh and ignorant to even quote here. Yeesh.
Sky is producing the series, and Meghan Lyvers, Managing Director of Scripted Originals, had this to say: “Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist are two of modern fiction’s most iconic and compelling characters, and we’re thrilled to have Viola and David bringing them to life for a new generation. Our brilliant writing team, Reinaldo Marcus Green’s bold vision and our fantastic partners at Left Bank Pictures are creating a series that honors everything audiences love about ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,’ while taking its characters, mystery and themes into a world that feels unmistakably of the moment. We can’t wait for audiences to experience it.”
The series will air on Sky and is currently in development.
via Variety
