The King's Speech producer Harvey Weinstein has told Newsweek his "favourite mistake" in Hollywood was failing to buy the US film rights to Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy.

David Fincher is currently adapting the bestselling novels for the big screen following the success of earlier Swedish versions. Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara will star as campaigning journalist Mikael Blomkvist and hacker Lisbeth Salander.

"Everything about it in my gut said, 'Do this'," Weinstein said. "But my team said, 'No, we should focus on bigger movies' ... I didn't listen to my very significant gut ... And that was a big bloody mistake."

Meanwhile, Weinstein and his brother Bob, who together head the Weinstein Company, are being sued for $50m by two animated film-makers who claim they botched the release of CGI movie Escape from Planet Earth and then paid $500,000 to keep the dispute quiet before the Oscars. The suit by Hoodwinked! writer Tony Leech and Brian Inerfeld, which was filed at the New York supreme court last week, labels the siblings "two out-of-control movie executives ... who sabotaged what should have been a highly profitable movie through a potent combination of hubris, incompetence, profligate spending, and contempt for contractual obligations".

The Weinsteins, whose film The King's Speech won four Oscars last week, are vigorously denying the allegations.

"This is a completely frivolous lawsuit," said Weinstein Company lawyer Bert Fields. "The pleading contains little more than false, gratuitous, slanderous, preposterous and totally irrelevant personal attacks on TWC and its principals."