January 13, 2012

What makes an adaptation work? or, Did something go wrong with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo?

by Melville House

Stieg Larsson‘s trilogy of Swedish crime novels are some of the best-selling and most recognizable books of the last 50 years. There’s isn’t a literate soul in America who isn’t at least aware of Lisbeth Salander and her adventures in a very corrupt modern Sweden. And yet, with an $80Million box-office take after three weeks The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, though not a box-office failure, is far from the wild success analysts or Sony Pictures were expecting.

What went wrong? The film had an incredible advertising campaign, a trailer that went viral, and an enormous target audience that surely didn’t fail to turn out because of the previously released Swedish film. This wasn’t a passion project for David Fincher or the producers, it was a movie designed to make money, and considering the exposure of the property it’s—so far, domestically—been a disappointment.

Was the market saturated? The book has internationally sold more than 30 Million copies (visit this fascinating Wikipedia page for best-selling books to date in any language)—have those readers tired of Larsson?

Compare this release to the phenomenal success of The Help earlier this year.* The Help grossed $170Million and was a surprise box-office smash. Certainly the competition wasn’t as strong in August when The Help was released, but period dramas don’t attract the kind of audiences or buzz this movie enjoyed.

Are mysteries just less compelling once they’ve been unravelled? If so what accounts for The Da Vinci Code‘s $217Million box-office haul? Tom Hanks?

To those of us in publishing, and most likely in the movie industry as well, success is a riddle. Any insight readers can offer will be most appreciated.

*Interestingly these two titles are currently #1 and #2 on the NYT Bestseller List. And the films have been reviewed both by audiences and critics pretty similarly—Rotten Tomatoes gives Girl a score of 86% compared to The Help’s score of only 76%—though the audience rating was 91% to 90% in The Help’s favor, meaning audiences were marginally more taken with The Help.

6 Comments

Joseph D'Agnese at 8:10 am on January 13, 2012

A few people I spoke to while waiting to buy tix at a theater said some things that may shed light on this. Some people had read the book, liked it, but thought it was too creepy to “see” in a theater. Others were seeing the film because they hadn’t read the book. Everyone seemed to know it’s a creepy franchise, and maybe that’s not the sort of film people run out to see during the holidays. I’m surprised, actually.
Patrick Glendening at 9:30 am on January 13, 2012

The timing of the release. They put it into the market at the wrong time. It’s cold most places in the US and it gets dark early. A film with this kind of an edge, the kind that leaves you wondering if there’s hope for humanity, would’ve been better received in summer. No one wants to leave the theater from a movie that was, “designed to make money,” and feel like their moral compass has lost its directional north, especially in the dead of winter. Much easier to let the cold imagery and empty music wash over you if you know you an go grab a cold beer at an outside bar or hang with your friends on the porch afterwards.

Everything about the film screamed, “This is gonna be heavy!” For this time of year it probably would’ve been better placed in art house cinemas with a lower budget.
Justin Bryant at 12:45 pm on January 13, 2012

It’s superficial, but when people see a trailer called The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and then the girl in question looks like a high school goth chick, it’s not a great start.
Marie at 1:06 pm on January 13, 2012

For me, it felt like Dragon Tattoo overload. I saw the Swedish movies, read the books, blah blah blah. Enough already. I’ll bet lots of people skipped it because they’d already seen the Swedish movies, or because having an American version of films that aren’t even that old seemed so cynical. The Swedish movies are recent and they’re really good, so who needs the new ones? Also, Daniel Craig? Really?
Cvan at 1:11 am on January 15, 2012

I assume that most who were interested just saw the Swedish movies. They were frankly American style thrillers, just with subtitles, so the Fincher film seems redundant.
alice at 7:01 pm on January 25, 2012

From what I gather–working at a bookstore–a huge amount of it is squeamishness: many people, whether they’ve read the book or not, are aware just how violent it is and don’t want to be trapped in a theater watching a graphic rape scene. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard my customers say they’re waiting for the dvd release so they can fastforward. Granted, the bulk of my customer base is a little older, but they’re also the demographic who helped make the book such a hit, so…