MGM Loses Film Rights to ‘Tomb Raider’ IP
Alicia Vikander is no longer attached to playing Lara Croft in any future Tomb Raider movies.
According to The Wrap, MGM has lost the movie rights to the Tomb Raider IP after it failed to greenlight a sequel to the 2018 film. Apparently, multiple studios have now engaged in a bidding war to acquire film adaptation rights, now that those have reverted back to the game company. A sequel to 2018’s Tomb Raider starring Alicia Vikander had been in the works, with Ben Wheatley at some point attached to direct. It then gained some momentum again when in January 2021 Misha Green, showrunner of Lovecraft Country, was hired to write and direct a new adventure.
It seems like the deal went nowhere, and now we’ll have to wait a few years for a new Tomb Raider movie, with a new actress (Vikander’s contract was with MGM). It’s unknown what caused the ship to sink, though greenlighting a sequel was always a questionable decision, after the Roar Uthaug-directed adaptation didn’t wow audiences and made $23.6M opening weekend on a $94 million budget. Most of its worldwide box office, which ended up at $274.6M, was made overseas. Executives thought that the word-of-mouth around the project and the IP, in general, was good enough to move ahead with another film, but it seems like they weren’t that excited about it. Purely speculating, sequels tend to cost more money than the first, and maybe the producers of the movie couldn’t get the studios’ approval on all grounds after the box office underperformance of the first one.
Vikander has seemingly moved on as well. The actress recently starred in the HBO limited series Irma Vep (you can check out our review here), and has a movie in post-production, Firebrand, directed by Karim Aïnouz, and also starring Jude Law. The actress recently opened up about how she felt the most depressed when she was at the height of her fame, telling The Sunday Times:
“In other people’s eyes, [when] I was at my height of fame, I was the most sad. I kept telling myself, ‘Take it in. It is incredible.’ But I didn’t know what to do. There were all these first-class flights, five-star rooms. But I was always by myself.”
With a bidding war erupted around the film adaptation rights, it’s very possible we’ll hear very soon what the next house for the IP will be in Hollywood. Even then, a new film is probably three to five years down the line, which might be good enough for the video game genre to get some positive momentum. The upcoming The Last of Us HBO series promises to be the project that might finally break the curse on video game adaptations. It will premiere in the first half of 2023.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
