According to the Daily Mail’s sources, the idea of Lara Croft bringing her gun-toting capoeira to Prime Video is “dead,” and we honestly should’ve seen this coming.
Amazon ordered a full season of the Tomb Raider series last May, and it has reportedly been in development since 2019, around when Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge signed a massive three-year, $20 million-a-year deal to create shows for the company and became attached to the project. A year after the full season order, and only weeks before this news of the series’ possible demise, there was still no script for the show. This comes four years after Waller-Bridge’s writing partnership with Donald Glover on the Amazon series Mr. & Mrs. Smith was dissolved in what Glover described, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, as a kind of creative “divorce.”
Beyond the highly anticipated show having no script, the series might’ve had no star either. Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner was set to play Lara Croft as recently as five months ago, but is reportedly busy filming other projects. Between February - May 2024, Turner was announced to be attached to four different projects, including Haven, another Amazon Prime Video series. Jugging all of that and trying to backflip while shooting at bats in caves as one of the most iconic female video game characters ever does seem a bit daunting. And with no script, it’s easy to see how the Tomb Raider series could stop being a priority.
Neither Amazon nor Waller-Bridge has addressed reports of the show being cancelled, and IMDB still has the show as one of Turner’s upcoming projects. Hopefully someone brings Lara Croft back to the screen, espeically since Amazon signed another lucrative deal with Waller-Bridge days before news of the Tomb Raider show likely being dead was reported.