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HBO’s quickfire renewal of The Last of Us may have been dominating the video game discourse with good reason, but the announcement that Amazon is rebooting Tomb Raider as a Marvel Cinematic Universe-style multimedia franchise runs it a close second.
After Alicia Vikander’s sequel was finally put out of its misery and killed off for good, it was inevitable that iconic adventurer Lara Croft would be dusted off and rebooted yet again, but an entire unified mythology that spans film, television, and games being spearheaded by Phoebe Waller-Bridge most definitely wasn’t on our bingo card.
It’s ambitious without a doubt, but does Amazon really have the capability to pull it off? If we look at Tomb Raider‘s history on the big screen, the movies did at least combine to earn over $700 million at the box office, but not a single one of them managed to score above 53 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, with Vikander’s sole stab actually landing a better rating than both of Angelina Jolie’s efforts put together.
Secondly, Amazon Games doesn’t exactly have a stellar reputation, and it’s going to require an awful lot of dots being joined to ensure that Tomb Raider neatly dovetails across three different platforms that typically tend to work in opposition to each other.
Most pertinently, does anybody really need to see the classic console saga trying to replicate the MCU formula after countless other properties have tried and failed utterly miserably?
A Tomb Raider reboot on its own – whether that was a feature film or a TV series – would gauge interest in how much people truly wanted to see from the IP on a broader scale. And yet, Amazon has gone ahead and secured what’s been called its biggest-ever commitment outside of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, with the first season of the Tolkien adaptation alone costing $465 million.
The company is clearly all-in, then, but given the general confusion and indifference to have greeted the massive reveal online, there’s a lot of work to be done to convince the doubters that Tomb Raider is even worthy of an MCU-lite existence, never mind capable of pulling it off.