Iconic video game heroine Lara Croft has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity over the past four years years, thanks to the combined critical and commercial success of the 2013 Tomb Raider game franchise reboot and its 2015 followup, Rise of the Tomb Raider. Lara is returning to the big screen too, with the first official images of Oscar-winner Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina, Jason Bourne) in both character and costume as the world-traversing archaeologist, having now been released online.
The Tomb Raider movie franchise reboot is simply titled Tomb Raider and is currently in production, under the direction of filmmaker Roar Uthaug (The Wave). Joining Vikander as members of the Tomb Raider film's cast are Walton Goggins as the main antagonist (whose identity remains under-wraps for now), as well as Into the Badlands' Daniel Wu as one of Lara's allies and Dominic West (The Affair) as Lara's long-missing father.
Lara herself is the only one pictured in the first of three official Tomb Raider reboot images released by Warner Bros. Pictures and MGM, as you can see in the gallery below. In addition to said photo of Croft making her way through a jungle (as she has a habit of doing), there's another photo that shows Miss Croft facing opposite someone (Wu's character with long hair, perhaps?) who may or may not be a friend - though Lara appears to believe it's the latter, in this case.
[vn_gallery name="Tomb Raider (2018) Images" id="932332"]
The third Tomb Raider photo in the gallery above shows Lara looking worse for wear with a pickaxe in hand, but little context as to where she is and how she wound up in that condition. Uthaug's film is based on a screenplay written by Geneva Robertson-Dworet (who's also writing the upcoming Suicide Squad spinoff, Gotham City Sirens, for WB) and will provide a fresh backstory for the big screen version of Lara, similar to what the 2013 video game did for her pixelated counterpart. As such, it's to be expected that this version of Lara will be a bit rougher around the edges than her predecessor, as played by Angelina Jolie in the Tomb Raider movies from the early 2000s.
Lara's search for her father drives the plot of the Tomb Raider reboot, further illustrating how the film play out as an origin story for Vikander's iteration of the character. Most big screen franchise reboots of late have similarly taken on the form of origin stories, with this month's Kong: Skull Island and Power Rangers being recent (and commercially viable) examples. Vikander is a prime candidate to lead an action franchise of her own, so who knows; Tomb Raider may yet buck the trend of most video game adaptations (Resident Evil being the exception that proves the rule) and become the first of many films, taking audiences on adventures around the globe with Vikander's Croft for years to come.
NEXT: Tomb Raider (2018) Official Synopsis
Source: Warner Bros. Pictures and MGM
