WhenDavid Fincherwas fielding accolades for his 2010 masterpieceThe Social Network, he was already in the midst of filming his follow-up project. On the surface,The Girl with the Dragon Tattoowasn’t a significant departure for Fincher. At the time, he was already well-versed in the arena of making dark dramas with an edge, be itThe GameorZodiac, and he clearly had plenty of experience telling stories about serial killers. The source material ofDragon Tattoowas massively popular, sure, but with that popularity came the opportunity to take hold of an even bigger budget, telling this dark tale about a pair of outsiders investigating a killer of woman against an epic canvas. What Fincher (and the rest of us) couldn’t have known at the time, however, was thatThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoowould be one of the last of its kind, the dying breath of the big budget studio adult drama, as Hollywood would pivot to bigger, flashier, and more superhero-er films in the ensuing years. In hindsight,The Girl with the Dragon Tattoois a fossil from a bygone era.
The “American” adaptation ofStieg Larsson’s bestselling novelThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoowas born in 2009, when producerScott Rudinsecured the rights to the book for Sony Pictures and fellow producersMichael LyntonandAmy Pascal. They set Oscar-winningSchindler’s ListscreenwriterSteven Zaillianto work on the adaptation, and in March 2010—just as Fincher had completed principal photography on Sony’sThe Social Network—the studio began courting theSe7enfilmmaker to take the helm.
Fincher had actually been approached aboutDragon Tattooyears earlier byKathleen Kennedy, with whom he’d worked onThe Curious Case of Benjamin Button. But he rejected the proposition without reading the book, assuming a movie about a bisexual hacker in Stockholm who helps a disgraced journalist uncover a dark secret would never get made. The Swedish film adaptation proved he was wrong, and when Pascal came calling a couple years later,she had an exciting proposition:
“As I finishedSocial Network, [Sony studio boss] Amy Pascal told me they’d just bought the rights toDragon Tattoo,” says Fincher. “She said, ‘We believe that a movie franchise doesn’t necessarily have to be for 11-year-olds, that this material is most certainly not for 11-year-olds and that is why we are bringing it to you’.”
And so the idea of creating a $100 million franchise film made solely for adults was appealing, especially in 2010, when that kind of movie was being made less and less. Films likeMunich($70 million budget),Gangs of New York($100 million budget), andJerry Maguire($50 million budget) were becoming a rarity, at least at those price points. The mid-to-high-budget drama was disappearing as studios pivoted to high-concept genre fare, and indeed 2010—whenThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoowas greenlit and began production—marked a turning point.
Topping the box office in 2010 were films that would prove to be harbingers of what was to come: Disney/Pixar’sToy Story 3, Disney’sAlice in Wonderland, and Marvel Studios’Iron Man 2. TheToy Storysequel proved that Disney could mine nostalgia to great success, as moviegoers who were children when the firstToy Storycame out were now old enough to buy their own tickets, and more than willing to dig back into their childhoods with a teary-eyed sequel about growing up. And now 2019 alone will bring us live-action adaptations of 90s favoritesAladdinandThe Lion King.Alice in Wonderland—which grossed over $1 billion worldwide—solidified 3D as a new way for studios to squeeze even more money out of ticketbuyers, setting off a rush of 3D conversions for a strategy that would prove to be widespread, yet short-lived. AndIron Man 2, of course, was a mere stepping stone on the path towards marketplace domination for Marvel Studios.
And then here comesThe Girl with the Dragon Tattooin December 2011, a nearly three-hour drama set in Sweden thatkind offollows the mystery of a serial killer but is really a film about misogyny in its many forms. The cause of the film’s somewhat lackluster performance at the box office (it made $232.6 million worldwide) can be debated, fromDragon Tattoofatigue to poor timing (and Fincher reportedly butted heads with the studio over the film’s marketing), but at the end of the day David Fincher made a David Fincher film through and through. The drama’s themes remain resonant all the years later, the immaculate craftsmanship is a feast for the senses, andRooney MaraOscar-nominated performance is still, well, great. And it was all painted on an epic canvas that traversed ambitious narrative territory throughout its unique five-act structure.
But while fans were clamoring to see the sequels that never materialized, we didn’t realize films likeDragon Tattoowere about to go extinct. Subsequent years saw some big-budget adult hits here and there likeThe Wolf of Wall StreetandDjango Unchained, but the box office charts started to become overcrowded with superheroes, Disney animated films, and franchises likeFast & FuriousorThe Hunger Games—and that’s beforeStar Warscomes into the picture in 2015. Meanwhile, dramas likeAmerican Hustle(made for $40 million) are starting to get made for far less than Hollywood used to invest in dramas made specifically for adults.
It’s no coincidence that Fincher’s next project afterDragon Tattoowas executive producing and directing the first two episodes ofHouse of Cards, the original series that launched Netflix as a destination for prestige original content. In 2018, filmmakers likeCary Joji Fukunaga,Steven Soderbergh, and evenMartin Scorseseare flocking to television to dabble in the kind of adult storytelling on a large canvas that has largely disappeared from cinemas, and Fincher was at the forefront all those years ago withHouse of Cards. It’salsono coincidence that after Fincher wraps up the second season of his second Netflix seriesMindhunter, his next feature film project is expected to beWorld War Z 2.
Now, no one expects Fincher to phone in a zombie apocalypse movie with theWorld War Zsequel, but his involvement is indicative of what it takes to get more complicate ideas on movie screens nowadays. In the vein of how the horror genre has been a vehicle for challenging thematic subject matter for decades, filmmakers are now using big budget genre movies to explore engaging thematic ideas. Movies likeMad Max: Fury Road,Black Panther, or evenStar Wars: The Last Jedihave fare more on their mind than explosions or lightsaber fights, but filmmakers likeRyan CooglerorRian Johnsoncan’t really explore those ideas on a large canvas without the packaging of a Marvel movie or aStar Warsmovie. Studios simply aren’t willing to pony up $80 million for an adult drama anymore.
Even in the case of theDragon Tattoofranchise, Sony Pictures is releasing a reset of sorts,The Girl in the Spider’s Web, but it’s a very different take. For one, it’s adapted from one of the booksnotwritten by Larsson, but it also carries a reported budget of just $43 million. It’s not even being marketed as a major tentpole the way Fincher’s film was. This one is dropping in early November, as a smaller-scale genre movie of sorts.
WithThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher adapted a bestselling pageturner into a lengthy, compelling, and challenging film about misogyny and the relationships between men and women. It used to be that was enough, but even then Fincher seemed aware that he was getting away with something. He knew the idea of Sony greenlighting a near-$100 million drama was a rare opportunity, and he took it and ran with it. What he maybe didn’t know, and what we certainly didn’t know, was how quickly the Hollywood landscape would shift. The times they aren’t a’changin’—they’ve changed. And whether a film likeThe Girl with the Dragon Tattooever gets made again is anyone’s guess.
