A fol­low-up to The Girl with the Drag­on Tat­too has been announced

Rooney Mara is out of the sequel to the US ver­sion of The Girl with the Drag­on Tat­too. In fact, so is every­one else, as direc­tor Fede Alvarez, who struck gold with his spooky hor­ror hit, Don’t Breathe, takes the direc­to­r­i­al reins from the series’ orig­i­nal over­seer, David Fincher.

Yet if the name of this new fea­ture – The Girl in the Spider’s Web – doesn’t instant­ly ring a bell, that’s because it’s a new­ly-writ­ten adden­dum to the late Stieg Larsson’s orig­i­nal ​‘Mil­len­ni­um’ tril­o­gy, by the best­selling author David Lager­crantz, who announced this new film at the 2017 Lon­don Book Fair.

Every­one involved with the US Drag­on Tat­too must pre­sum­ably be relieved at the deci­sion, as it means they’ll no longer be asked what’s hap­pen­ing with the fran­chise dur­ing press inter­views for oth­er movies. But it’s inter­est­ing to note that, as a nice lit­tle pre-pro­duc­tion mar­ket­ing tie-in, the mak­ers are set to embark on a ​“world search” for the right per­son to play the icon­ic cyber­punk hack­er, Lis­beth Salander.

Hell, this was the role that made Rooney Mara a house­hold name, and Noo­mi Rapace before her in the Swedish-lan­guage orig­i­nals, so this one is going to be a big prize for lucky soul out there. It may seem a lit­tle obvi­ous to say so (and maybe ruin the fun of scour­ing the globe for new tal­ent), but you could absolute­ly imag­ine Kris­ten Stew­art in full-on thou­sand-yard avenger mode in this role. But it might be the wrong time…

Any­way, the script is in, the direc­tor is locked, and the cam­eras are set to roll in Sep­tem­ber of 2017, with final release date already pen­cilled in for 5 Octo­ber, of 2018. We’re look­ing for­ward to it already.