Last year it was announced that the next Tomb Raider game would be published by Amazon, with Crystal Dynamics returning to develop. Now, according to sources at The Hollywood Reporter, a Tomb Raider TV series is in development at Amazon Prime with Phoebe Waller-Bridge attached as a writer and executive producer. Waller-Bridge previously wrote and starred in Fleabag, was showrunner for the first series of Killing Eve, and was a writer on the last James Bond movie, No Time To Die.
While she’s performed in movies like Solo: A Star Wars Story and will be appearing in the next Indiana Jones, Waller-Bridge apparently won’t be playing Lara Croft, though The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t say who will be following Angelina Jolie and Alicia Vikander in the role.
That’s not all. Amazon has a movie coming as well, which will be tied to both the series and the game “to build out a connected world of Tomb Raider”. Basically, a Lara Cinematic Universe then. (MGM lost the rights to Tomb Raider when a planned sequel to the Vikander movie fell through.)
To complicate things, Netflix also has a Tomb Raider series in the works, having announced an anime version with Powerhouse, the studio who animated Castlevania. It’ll feature Hayley Atwell, who played Peggy Carter in various Marvel projects, as the voice of Lara Croft. It’s likely to run this year, and has been described as an attempt to unify the timelines of the existing versions of the character. Something that’ll only get messier if Amazon’s projects reboot her again.
Amazon currently has a TV series based on the Fallout games in production, which began filming in July of 2022. That one will star Walton Goggins from Justified, who coincidentally played an archaeologist in the 2018 Tomb Raider movie. Amazon’s Fallout series isn’t retelling any of the games, instead being an original story, though who knows which direction they’ll go with Tomb Raider. Based on Waller-Bridge’s previous work, hopefully it has a sense of humor.