Despite making $233 million worldwide with the first movie, Sony is still apprehensive about moving forward with a sequel to 2011’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And while we thought that the biggest hurdle for the film was the willingness of director David Fincher to come back, it turns out that Daniel Craig might be the real reason why production on the second installment in Stieg Larsson’s trilogy hasn’t begun yet.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the studio wants to scale back on production costs for the movie. That means that special effects, location shooting, and, most importantly, salaries would all be reduced for the sequel. That apparently isn’t sitting well with star Daniel Craig, who actually wants a raise from Sony. And after Skyfall made over $1 billion at the box office in 2012, we can understand why a pay cut would be unacceptable to the actor.
The simplest solution here would be to throw Craig a few extra bucks and hope that the combination of his name, and the popularity of the book, would propel the movie to a box office success. But that might not be what the studio is thinking. The site goes on to say that if an agreement can’t be reached, then Craig’s character might actually be written out of the script.
This isn’t the worst thing in the world, because Larsson’s novel, titled The Girl who Played with Fire, focuses more on Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth Salander character this time around, but it would still take a script re-write to get Craig’s Mikael Blomkvist role out of the story. It’s uncertain if the studio wants to spend the time and money doing that, thus delaying production further.
We’ll have more information on this story as it unfolds.
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[via THR]
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