Lovecraft Country's Misha Green to direct new Tomb Raider movie with Alicia Vikander

By Sam Barsanti | January 26, 2021 | 2:09am

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Lovecraft Country's Misha Green to direct new Tomb Raider movie with Alicia Vikander

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According to Deadline, Lovecraft Country showrunner Misha Green has been tapped to write and direct the next Tomb Raider movie—which will feature Alicia Vikander returning to reprise her role as Lara Croft from the 2018 Tomb Raider movie. This will be Green’s feature directorial debut, but that and Vikander’s involvement are the only things we know about it. That being said, the 2018 Tomb Raider movie reboot was based on the plot of the 2013 Tomb Raider video game reboot, so it stands to reason that the movie sequel will take some inspiration from the video game sequel, 2015's Rise Of The Tomb Raider. That one was about Lara getting stranded in Siberia and racing to find a mystical artifact before the bad guy mercenaries could find it and become immortal bad guys (Lara Croft is an archaeologist in the way that Indiana Jones is an archaeologist), so this movie could have some snowy action in place of the first movie’s jungle island action. Then again, Tomb Raider 2018 ended with a little nod to the pre-2013 games, so who knows.

The first Tomb Raider (or, rather, the 2018 Tomb Raider) didn’t land especially well with critics, but it made good money at the box office. We’ve known a sequel was in development for a while, but last we heard, Ben Wheatley of High-Rise and Free Fire was directing it. There’s no mention of Wheatley in Deadline’s report, so it’s unclear how much of his version of Tomb Raider 2 will be in Green’s version of Tomb Raider 2, but again, she is also writing in addition to directing. That means she could be completely rewriting it—not that we would know, since we won’t see whatever Wheatley version of the movie would’ve been.