10 More Insane Reasons Actors Didn't Return For Sequels

It's an unfortunate truth about the movie industry, but generally the bottom line comes before everything else. If a studio sees a way to make something more profitable, they will take it, but it doesn't always work out the way it was intended.

This is exactly what happened with The Girl in the Spider's Web. It didn't matter that David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was almost universally critically acclaimed, as the fact that it only made $232 million at the box office put the franchise on ice for seven years.

When the Millennium story was revisited in 2018, not only did Sony Pictures skip two novels and jump straight to the fourth, but neither Fincher, screenwriter Steven Zallian, nor composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross returned. Arguably most importantly, neither did Daniel Craig or Rooney Mara, who played Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander respectively in 2011.

Thanks to its lower-than-expected box office haul, the sequel's budget was slashed in half, meaning there wasn't the money to bring back either Craig or Mara, both of whom were so instrumental to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo being received as well as it was. It almost goes without saying that spending less on The Girl in the Spider's Web, and getting rid of the two leading actors, didn't make the sequel any more profitable.