David Fincher stalking The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo?

It took me nearly 2 weeks to snowplow through the first 100 densely packed pages of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — and 2 riveting nights to ride the avalanche of the remaining 400. To be fair, the tangled plot needs a fair amount of setup as foundation for the interlocking puzzle structure, but the Swedish film adaptation comes front-loaded with a lot of dialogue exposition that works better on the page that it does onscreen. What it needed was a director who’s more adept at shuffling several layers of visual narrative.
As luck would have it:

…Vulture also hears that David Fincher is circling a movie adaptation of the late Stieg Larsson‚Äôs best-selling mystery The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Scott Rudin is producing at Sony, with screenwriter Steve Zaillian (Schindler‚Äôs List, American Gangster) adapting the novel. Though a deal hasn‚Äôt been made, insiders tell us that Sony brass are delighted with the work Fincher has done on The Social Network, the Aaron Sorkin adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s book about Facebook’s founders. Meanwhile, the Larsson project has Best Actress nominee Carey Mulligan on its wish list…

I thought the casting was way off in the first swing at adaptation too, but the image of a hardcore tattooed and body-pierced Carey Mulligan feels even further off-base. Reserving judgement because a good contortionist stretch might be a fascinating exercise. Who would you cast as Lisbeth Salandar?

Swedish trailer after the cut.