Having only grossed $55 million domestically so far (on a $90 million budget), David Fincher’s English-language Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has been perceived as something of a box office disappointment. But don’t box up your stun gun and dildo just yet, because Sony says Dragon Tattoo‘s sort-of soft box office won’t effect their plans for a sequel. YAY! Strawberry merkins for everyone!

“[Dragon Tattoo] continues to do strong business and nothing has changed with respect to development of the next book,” a Sony rep tells EW. In November, Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal told us that The Girl Who Played With Fire was definitely a go, with a targeted late-2013 release date. [EW]

Despite the crappy ending, I thought Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was pretty good, and I guarantee you it would’ve made a lot more money had they released it sometime between January and April when it would’ve had zero competition instead of throwing it in the late-December Oscar bait pile. In any case, I’m down for the next two. Ooh, you think there’ll be violence against women?

So far, there’s just one sticking point, and it’s kind of a big one. Fincher isn’t signed on yet.

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"Quit it with the AC Slater stuff. Don't you respect chairs?"

I haven’t read the Stieg Larsson books or seen the Swedish-language film adaptations, so you’ll get no comparisons here (GOD, I’M SO IGNORANT!), but as rendered by David Fincher, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is basically an above-average murder mystery with a sloppy ending, mostly unnoteworthy — but for one thing: Lisbeth Salander, who, as a character, is damn near groundbreaking, and no, dummy, it’s not because she dresses like suicide girl Barbie. With Salander, Fincher/Larsson do right by “strong female heroin” in a way that movies have been f*cking up for probably 100 years. Then they totally screw it up again, but we’ll get to that later.

Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, a recently-disgraced journalist (loser of a high-profile libel suit by a wealthy industrialist) who gets hired by another wealthy industrialist, this one retired, played by Christopher Plummer, to investigate a decades-old murder. Plummer comes from a family of kooky ex-Nazis (Stieg Larsson was himself a journalist who investigated right-wing extremists), almost all of whom still live on a sleepy island in the north of Sweden (with shades of Wicker Man, Insomnia). Plummer wants Craig to find out how his niece disappeared into thin air one day at a family reunion back in the 60s. In exchange, Plummer promises to provide Craig some dirt on the industrialist who disgraced him. Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth Salander, a bisexual, antisocial ward of the state with a photographic memory, works with a firm of investigators. She comes into the picture first as the operative who does the background check on Craig for Plummer, but soon she and Craig find themselves working together on the murder. OOH, DOES ANYONE ELSE SMELL AN UNLIKELY PARTNERSHIP? I’ll be your Danny Glover. Just let me get my merkin.

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FINCHERBOMB'D

Yesterday I told you about the email fight (sort of) between New Yorker critic/scarf enthusiast David Denby (left), and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo producer/chocolate enthusiast Scott Rudin (right), over Denby’s decision to run his Dragon Tattoo review a week ahead of the “embargo” date he’d agreed to. Rene Rodriguez of the Miami Herald asked David Fincher what he thought about it, and that seems important because Fincher directed the thing. As an aside, Rodriguez also points out that Denby once wrote a thoroughly scathing review of Fight Club, which is about what you’d expect from a dude in a fancy scarf who gets excited about Stephen Daldry movies.

Fincher didn’t remember Denby’s Fight Club review when I mentioned it to him (“Have you read Alexander Walker’s review?” he asked.) But he did have something to say about the [embargo kerfuffle].

Another aside here, you should totally check out that Alexander Walker review. It makes that Fox News segment about The Muppets being liberal brainwashing seem logical and carefully reasoned by comparison.

“I think Scott [Rudin]‘s response was totally correct. It’s a hard thing for people outside our business to understand. It is a bit of a tempest in a teapot. But as silly as this may all look from the outside – privileged people bickering – I think it’s important. Film critics are part of the business of getting movies made. You swim in the same water we swim in. And there is a business to letting people know your movie is coming out. It is not a charity business. It is a business-business.

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David Fincher’s take on Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens December 21st, and with Swedish-rape-crime fever just starting to heat up, the latest issue of Vogue has a feature on Rooney Mara, the actress who would be Lisbeth Salander. There are a few interesting tidbits in the article, including Fincher’s explanation of why Scarlett Johansson wouldn’t work as Lisbeth Salander, even though she’s Scandinavian (half Danish), and I think we all can agree she would’ve been a pretty great choice for that bare-tittie poster.

“We flew in people from New Zealand and Swaziland and all over the place,” he says. “Look, we saw some amazing people. Scarlett Johansson was great. It was a great audition, I’m telling you. But the thing with Scarlett is, you can’t wait for her to take her clothes off.” He stops for a moment. “I keep trying to explain this. Salander should be like E.T. If you put E.T. dolls out before anyone had seen the movie, they would say, ‘What is this little squishy thing?’ Well, you know what? When he hides under the table and he grabs the Reese’s Pieces, you love him! It has to be like that.”

“See, Scarlett Johansson is squishy. Gloriously squishy, like you can’t wait to get your hands on her. Rooney, she’s more like E.T. She gets naked and no one even notices unless she’s under a table trying to feed you Reese’s Pieces, you know?” Uh, cool story, David Fincher?

Meanwhile, I’d say Kirsten Dunst has been vindicated, at least in regard to her theory about her boobs being too big for Antichrist. I don’t know if I agree with her and Fincher that big-breasted actresses shouldn’t be cast in certain parts, but I will say this: fret not, voluptuous ladies. You’ll always get a fair shake when I’m around. (*mimes boob squeeze, bike horn sound*)

But that’s not the only interesting thing to come out of the profile. There’s also some stuff about rape and David Fincher as stern taskmaster. Hmmm, I made those two things sound much more related than I meant to.

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The 90-second teaser for David Fincher’s remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo came out back in May and people lost their sh*t, so I can only imagine what’s going to happen now that we have almost four minutes of it. I wasn’t as impressed with the first one as everyone else seemed to be, mainly because it was just random action cut to the beat of music, and that’s like high school video editing 101. Cutting video to music makes it look cool: fact. It’s kind of cheating. Anyway, this new one has no such tricks. Just four minutes of intrigue from the movie without really giving away much about the plot. Pretty damn impressive.

The film is based on Stieg Larsson’s internationally best-selling novel centering on a murder mystery looking as far back as 40 years at the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara). Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption. [RopeofSilicon]

Anyone else find it strange that the original book was in Swedish, as was the first film adaptation, and now that we have an English version, it’s still set in Sweden, but now all the Swedes speak English with different accents? There are two or three Englishman, Rooney Mara sounds Scandinavian, a couple vaguely Germanic-sounding dudes — we always just accept it because it sounds fancy and continental, but it makes no logical sense. Just once I’d like to see them try this with a chola, some dudes from Mississippi, three Hawaiians, and a Ukrainian. It’d be like a murder mystery set at my apartment complex. “Hey, Bra. I know you’re lesbo or whatever, but I hear you’re pretty good at investigateen. You know, for a haole.”

“Fack you, cawksuckah, can’t you see I’m fackin’ busy? Didn’t ya queah mothah evah teach you ta knawk?”

"Can you help us catch the eyebrow thief who did this, Lispeth?"

No eyebrows = nothing to lose. Opens December 21st. [via TheDailyWhat]