Actually, it seems that most everyone involved in the first film wanted to continue the series. In addition, the film was a modest financial success and Zaillian had already penned a screenplay for the second film. So what happened? My guess is that the success of the first film was TOO modest. In greenlighting the Fincher production, the studio was factoring in the built-in market from the international best-seller's fanbase, and assumed as well that the audience who had seen the successful Swedish films would be hungry for another adaptation. With these factors in mind, they most likely ambitiously projected high ticket sales, and across all three films, to boot. In other words, they probably saw this as a potential cash cow. Since studios handle a multitude of projects at any given time, these projections may have influenced other decisions they had been making at the time, or may have been seen as a way to offset possible losses from other unsuccessful projects in the recent past (purely speculation).
Basically, the MODEST success of the film was disappointing enough to crush their hopes of the cash cow, and they no longer felt comfortable giving the subsequent installments the generous budget they had allowed for Fincher. This theory is reinforced by the fact that apparently Sony is now greenlighting further adaptations, but with entirely new cast and crew with a more standard budget for a thriller series (Fincher ain't cheap).
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