‘Dragon Tattoo’ Trailer ‘Leaked,’ Goes ‘Viral,’ Is ‘Awesome’

Will Leitch
·Editor
James Bond is awfully careless with the ketchup. Sony Pictures
James Bond is awfully careless with the ketchup. Sony Pictures

Heading into this past weekend, there were rumblings of a red-band trailer for David Fincher's upcoming "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" film being shown on certain screens in Europe, before some R-rated movie out there, or "A," or whatever rating system they use. (We assume it's metric.) We haven't heard a report from a single person across the pond who claims they saw it at their local cinemas (or "Kinos," if you were in Germany, or "κινηματογράφος" if you were in Greece). But yet, lo, look! It has been "leaked!"

Yes, the next step in movie promotion is pretend piracy, with an obviously fake "shaky" Camcorder "sneaked" into a movie theater, jibing well with the film's and the book's punk, DIY ethos. We will say that if every person who filmed movie screens with their iPhone were as good at framing as this person is, piracy would be a far bigger problem than it already is. The trailer already has almost a million views on YouTube, and the best evidence that the red-band trailer is a studio plant is that it hasn't yet been taken down. (Though we bet it's replaced with a better version, oh, any minute now.)

It's a clever bit of marketing from Sony -- who, for its part, claims it must have been stolen, but, again, it's still on YouTube -- particularly because ... well, because the trailer is fantastic. The trailers for David Fincher movies are apparently put together by the David Fincher of trailer makers. We have never read the books, we never saw the Swedish films with Noomi Rapace and we have no idea what about the plot. But we just pushed over some arthritic old lady into traffic so we could get in line to this movie. And the second that Trent Reznor-Karen O cover of "Immigrant Song" is available for download, we might make it our ringtone. Or our alarm. That seems like an excellent way to start the day.

Here's the "bootleg" trailer, surely to be replaced by the "official" version soon. It's red-band, so NSFW warnings apply. (There's some blood and a couple of boobs.)

'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo': Internet Buzzes with Reactions to Trailer [The Hollywood Reporter]