It’s very rare that an overseas movie will turn someone into an international sensation, but Noomi Rapace’s performance as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was so formidably phenomenal that she instantly became one of the most in-demand actresses on the planet in the aftermath.
Making the jump to Hollywood almost immediately, the Swedish star may not have managed to recapture the same heights in terms of sheer critical acclaim, but she hasn’t done bad for herself regardless. The downside is that the graphic crime thriller proved so popular that it was eventually franchised all the way into the ground, albeit in different fashion than usual.
Sequels The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest were released a mere seven and nine months later respectively, while David Fincher’s Academy Award-nominated remake landed in theaters less than three years after Niels Arden Oplev’s original became a global phenomenon that earned a mighty $104 million at the box office on a $13 million budget.
Extended editions of the entire trilogy were also showcased on television as a six-part miniseries, before the disastrous The Girl in the Spider’s Web fully lived up to its unnecessary status as the reboot of a remake that failed to get a standalone pair of sequels. It was a strange and entirely unexpected expansion for the Millennium saga, but the one that started it all holds up as well as ever.
It’s been taking out the competition on streaming, too, with FlixPatrol naming 2009’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as one of the top-viewed films on Google Play Movies this week, even if its excessive length and even more excessive violence may not be for everyone.