Quentin Tarantino isn’t even done editing Inglorious Basterds into its final form and he’s already circling new projects (that he’ll probably circle for the next five years). The latest possible QT project is one that he may want to do with Brad Pitt: Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy.
Don’t feel bad if you never heard of it. Or maybe you should feel bad, as Larsson was the second best selling author on Earth in 2008. And he’s been dead for a coupe of years. What did you accomplish while alive in ’08?
Larsson was a journalist who wrote a trilogy of novels for his own amusement; apparently he hadn’t been seriously shopping them around and had managed to write three full books, part of a fourth and outline possibly as many as ten novels in total. Larsson died of a heart attack; the first book in his trilogy was published a couple of months later and it became a major sensation. The next two followed and the trilogy was a smash hit.
The first book, published in English as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is about a journalist (who publishes a magazine called Millenium, thus the title of the trilogy) who teams up with a punk rock hacker girl to solve a serial murder case. Yeah, it doesn’t sound all that intriguing to me either, but apparently the book is super great. As is the Swedish movie version, which played at Cannes and got some rave reviews.
ANYWAY… Larsson died unexpectedly without a usable will. His estate is currently caught up in a battle between his family and his long-time girlfriend. The upside of all this? This quote from Larsson’s family in the Times of London:
“We are inundated with requests for permission to make plays and cartoon
strips out of Millennium,” they said. “Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt would
like to buy the rights for a remake of the film. We want her opinion.”
Could The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo be QT’s film after Basterds? Is QT really interested in buying the rights or is he being name-dropped in some kind of PR stunt to get the dispute solved quickly? Will we spend the next half a decade wondering what Tarantino is doing next?
I don’t know, but I do know that my local library has three copies of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and they’re all checked out.
via Thompson on Hollywood