20 Great Movie Remakes With One Miscast Role

Every fan of the Millennium Trilogy will tell you that Niels Arden Oplev’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo did not need to be remade. Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist gave definitive turns as Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, and carried the material through a rapidly released and overall satisfying trilogy. But if anyone was going to do an English-language remake, it had to be David Fincher.

Drawing on his usual steely palette, Fincher brings us into a world of mystery and intrigue as investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) attempts to track down a girl from a wealthy family who disappeared decades earlier, with the assistance of computer hacker and all-round badass Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara). It’s a great piece of work and dovetails nicely with the kind of plots Fincher usually pursues, but the casting could have been improved.

Craig is the awkward fit here, as Blomkvist is supposed to be an average middle-aged man, not literally James Bond, and Craig just brings too much of a chiselled, domineering, action man edge to the part. The problem is that they were casting a copy of a copy, by focusing on Nyqvist as the basis for the character (who is a midpoint between Craig’s iteration and the book), rather than the Blomkvist from Stieg Larsson’s novel.

But, hey, it could have been worse, as David Fincher also considered George Clooney for the role…