The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is officially heading to TV, with Sky greenlighting an eight-episode series that adapts the iconic Stieg Larsson book. Amazon had been trying to develop a Dragon Tattoo show for a while, but it never got off the ground. Sky’s involvement, along with Left Bank Pictures, now ensures that production on the new series will get underway in Lithuania in the spring, though the show’s cast has not yet been revealed.
Adaptations of Larsson’s book have come and gone over the years, with varying degrees of success. A Swedish version, starring Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander and Michael Nyqvist as Mikael Blomkvist, was well-regarded in 2009, while David Fincher’s 2011 effort starring Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig was critically praised but is often considered one of the director’s weaker films.
The book, originally titled Men Who Hate Women, follows a journalist and a hacker who begin investigating the disappearance of a girl 40 years ago, only to be drawn into a dangerous web of lies, misogyny, and systematic abuse. The new Dragon Tattoo series promises to bring the story “into the present,” but still “grounded in the characters and investigative DNA of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels, with themes that carry heightened relevance today.”
Inevitably, the show will give the story more room to breathe, whereas the movies had to compress everything into a couple of hours, but the mention of “themes that carry heightened relevance today” in the show’s description seems key, and also why a Dragon Tattoo series could finally do Larsson’s book justice. It feels like the right time to explore these themes, as they sadly haven’t dated.
