Amazon Adaptation of Global Bestseller Book Series Gets a Huge Update

Summary:

• Stieg Larsson’s Millennium book series is a global bestseller and one of the most well-known Scandinavian detective stories in the world.
• There have been three separate adaptation attempts so far, and now, Amazon is developing a TV show based on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
• Veena Sud, the showrunner of The Killing, will also overlook the new series which will take an unorthodox approach to Lisbeth Salander’s story.

There are few other book series that did so much for the popularity of the Scandinavian detective genre as Stieg Larsson’s Millennium. Largely known by the title of the first book, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, these novels revealed the chilling beauty of this genre to the world, and many authors followed in Larsson’s footsteps.

As it typically goes with bestselling novels of such scale, live-action adaptations of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo were quickly underway. To this day, three versions exist: the Swedish-American movie trilogy that came out in 2009, and David Fincher’s more famous two-chapter iteration starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara.

But now, the fourth adaptation is in the works over at Amazon. OK, not exactly an adaptation… But it has the same lead character as the books, alright?

Why Did The Previous Adaptations Fail?

The original Swedish live-action movies, unfortunately, went largely unnoticed by the larger audience due to being too local. While the connoisseurs of the iconic Scandinavian detective series enjoyed them, they lacked publicity to attract more attention. Two years later, David Fincher released his version, and it was different.

“We did it the way that we could. When people said it cost too much for what the return on investment was, I said, ‘Okay, swing and a miss.’ We had pledged early on that we wanted to make a movie that was not embarrassing to its Swedish heritage,” the director explained at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival.

Unfortunately, his dedication to the source material largely doomed the movie. Fincher wanted to only shoot in Sweden, and this cost way more than doing it in America. When his The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo only earned $102M domestically, the next installment was called off. And Federico Alvarez’s 2018 film was…just bad.

What’s Up With Amazon’s TV Show?

Unlike the previous two adaptations, Amazon intends to largely ignore Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series in terms of plot and characters and will only focus on one of the two leads: Lisbeth Salander. She will be taken out of her native story and placed in a modern setting with new stories and original characters to deal with.

According to Variety, Veena Sud will be the showrunner for Amazon’s TV show. Sud has great experience working on dark Scandinavian detectives and is best known for The Killing, her adaptation of the Danish series Forbrydelsen, but has also developed several other award-winning movies and series. The show’s in good hands.

The one thing that remains unknown is whether Amazon’s idea to rip Lisbeth Salander out of her native setting will work out at all. The original book series were not only successful for her character, but for the compelling story they featured. But we guess, we’ll have to wait and see how this plan works out.

Source: X (formerly Twitter), Variety