Amazon Prime Video has announced that Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the creator of Fleabag, will write and executive produce a new series based on the Tomb Raider franchise.
The franchise started as an action-adventure video game series, which put gamers in the combat boots of a fictional British archaeologist and adventurer Lara Croft, as she travelled around the world in search of lost artefacts and locations.
Waller-Bridge’s series is part of a deal between video game developer Crystal Dynamics and Amazon MGM Studios, to develop new Tomb Raider stories into TV series and films.
It's an attempt to build a Tomb Raider universe akin to the MCU, as Crystal Dynamics and Amazon Games have also previously announced a new complementary multiplatform Tomb Raider game.
Waller-Bridge said: “If I could tell my teenage self this was happening I think she’d explode."
“Tomb Raider has been a huge part of my life and I feel incredibly privileged to be bringing it to television with such passionate collaborators. Lara Croft means a lot to me, as she does to many, and I can’t wait to go on this adventure. Bats ‘n all.”
This will be the first series Waller-Bridge has created for the streamer since signing two consecutive three-year, eight-figure deals with Amazon, from September 2019.
She has been busy starring in BBC’s His Dark Materials and HBO’s Run. She also coincidentally joined Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones 5, the fifth film in George Lucas' beloved franchise about another fictional intrepid archaeologist. Tomb Raider's original creator Toby Gard once told BBC News that Indiana Jones inspired Lara Croft.
In one of TV’s greatest ‘almosts’, Waller-Bridge was set to appear in Amazon’s 2024 Mr. & Mrs. Smith TV reboot alongside Donald Glover, but quit the project in September 2021 citing creative differences. “Creative collaboration is like a marriage,” she told Vanity Fair in 2023, “and some marriages don’t work out.”
She also hinted at a reason for the long wait for her next project, admitting to the publication that she is “creatively controlling.”
“[Amazon] have been with me along this process where I’m like, ‘I’m getting there, but I want it to be fucking amazing.’”
No further details for her Tomb Raider series have been announced, and no cast has been set. But Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon MGM Studios, said that “fans and newcomers can look forward to exhilarating adventures that honour the legacy of this iconic character.”
