A feature adaptation of local author Stieg Larsson's mystery thriller "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" opened on 165 prints in Sweden and 100 in Norway last week -- big releases for those territories. During the spring the Swedish-language pic opens all over Europe, with an estimated 500 prints in France alone, comparable to a major Hollywood title.
Now an English-language version is being mulled, according to Swedish production company Yellow Bird execs, who have signed with Hollywood's UTA.
"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is the first part of Larsson's action-packed Millennium trilogy about journalist-turned-detective Mikael Blomkvist and fearless, tattooed computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. The author had intended to write 10 books in the series but only completed three before his death in 2004 age 50.
"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" became a hit soon after, staying on the best-seller lists in the U.S. and U.K. for weeks. The success made Larsson the second-best selling author in the world in 2008 -- the books have sold some 10 million copies worldwide -- after "The Kite Runner" author Khaled Hosseini.
Yellow Bird picked up the movie rights to the series before the first novel had been published.
"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" screened in Berlin for distributors including France's UGC and Italy's BIM.
"The buzz was very big, much bigger than I had thought," says producer Soren Staermose. "There is a great interest in the production from the U.S. and the U.K.
"Thanks to the books being so well known, there is a great awareness of it without us having to bang on the drum."
Book number two, "The Girl Who Played With Fire," comes out in the U.S. in July, and is already a bestseller in Blighty.
The 115 million kroner ($13.2 million) project's co-producers include Swedish Television (SvT), German pubcaster ZDF and Benelux company Lumiere. Through an early deal with SvT, the first book has been made into a TV series, while books two and three (whose title was not set before Larsson's death) have been made into a six part TV mini-series.
Staermose is working on an Asian rollout for the film and the TV series. The first book will be published in China in September.
"We are just waiting for markets like China to discover the phenomenon that is Stieg Larsson. To have the books published with a cover from the film is naturally a great help," he says.
In the meantime, talks are also under way to distribute "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" outside continental Europe. "We are right now in negotiations with all the English-speaking territories," says sales agent Zodiak's Cecila Cau.
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