Amazon developing Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series with no connection to the books

By Sam Barsanti | May 27, 2020 | 12:48am

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Amazon developing Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series with no connection to the books

Photo: The Girl In The Spider’s Web

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium books—a.k.a. the Girl Who/With/Whatever series, which is even less clear now that we think about it—have had a rough time trying to make the leap from page to screen, at least in Hollywood. David Fincher’s underrated The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo failed to make enough of a splash to justify becoming the franchise it was obviously hoping to be, and Fede Alvarez’s more recent reboot (take a deep breath for The Girl In The Spider’s Web: A New Dragon Tattoo Story) failed to even make a more financially restrained splash. Now, though, Amazon is approaching the books with a new idea that seems pretty smart, even if it also seems a tad insulting to Larsson himself.

According to Variety, Amazon is developing a TV series specifically about vigilante hacker Lisbeth Salander, the protagonist of the Millennium books, but with no other connection to what Larsson (or David Lagercrantz, who took over after Larsson’s death) actually wrote. That means a new setting, new supporting characters, and new stories, all in “today’s world.” In other words, it seems like Amazon is doing what the two Hollywood movies briefly gestured toward by turning Salander into a full-on superhero, untethered by the demands of an adaptation and free to take on a monster-of-the-week just like The Flash or the Elementary version of Sherlock Holmes.