The wait for the next Tomb Raider in the franchise is finally over as the reboot has found Roar Uthaug to fill the director’s chair.
Produced by GK Films, the movie will relaunch the adventure seeking archaeologist Lara Croft. With the director of the film in place, the production house is also finalising Geneva Robertson-Dworet for the screenplay, who’s previously worked on Hibernation and is also working on the upcoming Transformers 5.
Started out as a series of video games, the franchise then expanded to movies with Angelina Jolie reprising the role of the gun slinging archaeologist, with the first movie hitting theatres in 2001.
Along with GK Films, Warner Bros and MGM too have been partners in the production of the movie and have picked up rights from Square Enix in 2011. The details for the new movie remain hazy but according to rumours it will be based on Croft’s first adventure. Evan Daugherty, Marti Noxon and Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby were previously working on the script.
This will be Norwegian director Uthaug’s first commercial English speaking movie; he has previously directed movies like tsunami drama Wave, horror thriller Cold Prey, children’s adventure Magic Silver and survival action thriller Escape.
Before Uthaug, The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow, Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke, and Deep Impact director Mimi Leder were shortlisted to helm the project.
There is still no word on who will reprise the role of the adventure junkie Lara Croft after Jolie, who fit the bill to the T in the first two outings but after a debacle of the sequel refused to work on the third.
A franchise which had seen a dip in form after couple of movies and nothing much happening on the gaming front got a new breath of life after Square Enix released Tomb Raider in 2013 and it’s sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider that released last week.
Update: After much speculations and counter speculations on who will be filling in the lead role, it has been announced that, Alicia Vikander of The Danish Girl and Ex Machina fame will be taking on the mantle of Lara Croft in the upcoming ‘Tomb Raider’ movies. The character from the well known video game franchisee had been portrayed in the movies previously by Angelina Jolie. Vikander, the 27 year old Swedish actress, who recently won an Academy Award for Ex Machina, will also be seen in John Bourne starring opposite Matt Damon which is scheduled to release this summer. The new Tomb Raider movie’s release dates are yet to be announced yet, but it is expected to come out sometime in 2017.