The first games in the Tomb Raider franchise by Core Design featured a hyper-sexualized version of everyone’s favorite female archaeologist, Lara Croft, as many video games tend to do so with their female characters. But in recent years our favorite gun-wielding archaeologist-adventurer heroine has gone through a more realistic and grittier transformation, taking on the role of stranded survivor rather than a plunderer who calls herself an archaeologist (but is not afraid to use a shotgun at an archaeological site).
This movie version of Lara, played by the Oscar-winning Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina, The Danish Girl), will take on the intense, grittier form of the heroine based on the 2013 reboot game, simply titled Tomb Raider. The film will tell an origin story as Lara tries to investigate the disappearance of her father on a remote island.
Vikander is the second actress to play Lara Croft on the silver screen, after Angelina Jolie in the early 2000s who took the video game character to international superstardom. Directed by Norwegian director Roar Uthaug (The Wave, Escape), Tomb Raider will hit theaters (and many men’s hearts) in March 2018.