Lara Croft is an icon of gaming, but she’s been away from the spotlight for a good six years now. While she’s not unfamiliar with long breaks, like the five years between Underworld and the first of the reboot trilogy, and games take longer now to create, there seems to have been a more noticeable dearth.
Perhaps it’s because there was meant to be a second Alicia Vikander movie, or perhaps it was because Shadow of the Tomb Raider was a very good game, but in any case, the fans crave more from the famed British archaeologist. Luckily, more is on the horizon, with a lot of new media in the works that goes beyond remastered games.
Bridging the originals to the Survivor Trilogy
The Survivor Trilogy set out to tell what is essentially Lara Croft’s origin story and how she became the refined archaeologist and adventurer that we see in the earliest (in our timeline) instalments. From 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the next wave of games from Crystal Dynamics aims to bridge the gap to 1996’s Tomb Raider.
Naturally, it looks to be a sound investment on Crystal Dynamics’ behalf. Tomb Raider is an incredibly popular IP, and the reverence for Lara Croft has only grown since the last mainline release six years ago. She’s headlined a few spin-off and remaster releases through to 2024, and ventured into new realms of gaming.
Found at the PayPal mobile casino, there’s now Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Secret of the Sword, and the revamped Lara Croft: Temples and Tombs. All of them can be played via PayPal deposits and withdrawals, and each delves into a different Lara Croft adventure.
So, there’s been plenty of games with the Tomb Raider – especially if you count the I-III Remaster – but what all fans crave is another mainline entry to the story. According to reports, that game will be fully open world with parachutes and a motorcycle to help you get around, and we’ve already seen her new look.
Very reminiscent of the Temples and Tombs design, the Croft redesign struck well with gamers having been more or less tested in Call of Duty before its official launch. Importantly, while there is a tie-in series rapidly on the way, the next game from Crystal Dynamics won’t be tied in any way to what Amazon’s Prime Video is cooking up.
Lara Croft’s big TV outings are on the way
At the box office, just three Tomb Raider films have made over $700 million. It’s quite the return, especially if you factor in inflation for the movies released in 2001, 2003, and 2018. So, it makes sense that streaming platforms have been vying for a piece of the legendary IP.
First up will be Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft. This series, put out by Netflix, will pick up where the prequel trilogy left off. According to the Netflix press release, The Legend of Lara Croft will continue immediately after the events of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, so continuity can be expected from the character and its story.
Hayley Atwell – who has long been touted as an ideal casting for Lara Croft – will voice her in this new series. When it arrives on 10 October, it should serve to be the perfect dive back into the world of the Tomb Raider before the next game starts to ramp up its marketing.
On the other side of the coin, Amazon’s pushing on with filming a live-action series, which will start filming in 2015. In May 2024, they announced that Phoebe Waller-Bridge will write and executive produce the series. By April last year, it was reported that she’d already earned $60 million from Amazon to make a new show without doing so.
Throw in the treatment of well-known and respected IPs like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth and the Wheel of Time, and it’s understandable why the announcement of Prime doing a Tomb Raider live-action series has been muted at best. At least the new game on the way is being made by those who did the excellent Survivor Trilogy.
So, it won’t be long before Lara Croft is, once again, all over our screens, running and gunning against ancient mythical beings as the Tomb Raider.
