The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - to be filmed

European-films.net report the following:

After the both artistically and commercially successful children's film Drømmen (We Shall Overcome), which was inspired by director Niel Arden Oplev's own youth and set in the Danish countryside, the Danish filmmaker will cross the Kattegat and direct an adaptation of Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), the first of the Millenium novels triptych by the late Swedish journalist and novelist Stieg Larsson. Swedish star actor Michael Nyqvist (Äideistä parhain / Mother of Mine) is set to take on the role of Mikael Blomkvist, a former journalist who is asked to re-open an investigation into a case that happened forty years earlier.

The title of the first Millenium novel, Män som hatar kvinnor, literally means "Men Who Hate Women", but the tome will be published in English as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in January 2008. Oplev will start filming his adaptation not much later, in the spring of 2008. Upcoming Swedish actress Noomi Rapace will join Nyqvist on the set as the female lead of the film.

Larsson, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2004 at age 50, did not live to see any of his novels appear in print but has posthumously become a bestselling and prize-winning novelist. His trilogy of novels will be filmed in Sweden one after the other on a total budget of SEK 106 million (€11.4 million), but only Oplev's film will be released theatrically, with the second and third made for TV and DVD. No directors have been named for the second and third installment.

As stated above, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo will be available in English in January, from Quercus. The film is due out in Sweden in 2009.

A photo of the actor and more information can be found here.

UPDATE: Read the Euro Crime review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (book).