Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider reigned as the highest-grossing video game adaptation ever made for close to a decade after releasing in the summer of 2001, with its box office haul of $274 million remaining the genre’s benchmark for nine years until it was surpassed by Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
The sequel didn’t fare quite as well, though, with earnings dropping by over $100 million when The Cradle of Life arrived just two years later, but it was inevitable that we’d see the console favorite undergo a reboot eventually. Taking the ‘if it ain’t broke’ approach, 2018’s Tomb Raider hired an Academy Award winning actress to play the lead role, with Alicia Vikander proving herself to be a capable action heroine, delivering a perfectly functional if hardly memorable blockbuster that made exactly the same amount of money in theaters as the original, give or take a few hundred thousand dollars.
A sequel is now working its way through development as we speak, with Lovecraft Country creator Misha Green replacing Ben Wheatley as director and confirming earlier this month that the first draft of the script has been completed under the working title of Tomb Raider: Obsidian. That’s the extent of the official information we have, but insider Daniel Richtman claims that the studio wants Jolie to play a role in the second installment.
Unfortunately, that’s all he has to share on the matter, and these sorts of legacy cameos can often be jarring and detract from the story being told while inviting comparisons to what came before, especially when you’re talking about someone as recognizable as Angelina Jolie. The star has also scaled back her workload significantly over the last few years, but nothing can be definitively ruled in or out until Tomb Raider 2 edges closer to getting in front of cameras.
