The jury was out for a whole as to whether David Fincher‘s Americanized take on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (read my review here) would be successful enough to warrant sequels on the second and third books in Stieg Larsson‘s Millennium trilogy; in its third week of release the movie had yet to make back its reported $90 million budget, and then there’s the small matter of the cost of its expansive marketing campaign. But Sony did greenlight the sequels this week, though no word yet if the director or the stores will return.

In the creation of the film’s strangely epic opening credits sequence (scored to the cover of Led Zeppelin’s pile-driving rock classic “Immigrant Song” performed by Karen O. of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) Fincher instructed Tim Miller, the co-founder of credits creator Blur Studio and the sequence’s creative director, to incorporate not just elements of Larsson’s first Millennium novel into the surreal opening sequence but also of The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

You can watch the complete opening credits sequence and a behind-the-scenes video of its creation here below.

“I got a call from him, it was the middle of the night in Sweden and he was on some shoot that was going really bad,” Miller said in a recent phone interview with Wired.com. “And he calls me and he says, “˜Look, you’re going to do this thing and it’s going to redefine titles for our generation the way Se7en did and that’s all there is to it.'”

In creating the opening montage Miller and the digital artists at Blur selected a series of images alluding to particular moments in the Millennium trilogy that would make for striking visuals. Director Fincher approved 26 of them and those images were then created electronically and blended with 3-D scans of Mara and her co-star Daniel Craig. The two-and-a-half-minute sequence took Blur Studio several months to create.

You can order a copy of the film’s soundtrack featuring the “Immigrant Song” cover and Reznor and Ross’ full music score here.

Videos

The Making of the Opening Sequence

[Source: Wired]