In yet another case of a seemingly inevitable reboot, MGM and Warner Bros. (
Paramount/Viacom Inc. had two bites at the apple for this one as a tailor-made "star+concept" project back in the early 2000's. Angelina Jolie had just won an Oscar for Girl Interrupted and the Tomb Raider video game franchise was the first female-centric smash video game since Metroid. Since the game was in its initial form basically (all due respect) "Indiana Jones, but with breasts," it seemed like a pretty easy lay-up. Just cast one of the more interesting young actresses out there, one that everyone knew was just itching to get her action heroics thing on, and make an Indiana Jones/The Mummy type adventure and count your money. And it worked, kinda-sorta. Simon West's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider opened with $47 million in June 2001 but was unfortunately pretty terrible. The script was a mess, with a story pretzeled into shape to find a way to include Jon Voight as Croft's father, and too many of the action sequences were basically Lara standing and shooting at CGI things. It was a true "How do you f*** this up?!" moment in modern Hollywood.
The film earned just $131m domestic and an okay $274m worldwide on a $115m budget. But the opening meant there was apparently interest, so Jan De Bont was tasked with Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life in July 2003. Surprise, surprise, the sequel was actually better than the original, with real stunts and action sequences, a better male foil in Gerald Butler (as opposed to a painfully dull Daniel Craig), and a mostly straightforward "find the McGuffin and kill the bad guys" adventure story. But audiences were once-bitten, twice shy, and the $95m production earned just $65m domestic and $156m worldwide and thus establishing what I like to call "The Tomb Raider Trap," whereby a superior sequel to a much-hyped but artistically underwhelming original underperforms because audiences won't be fooled again. Jolie moved on to other things (Mr. and Mrs. Smith, saving the world, becoming a prestigious director, etc.) and we learned yet again that the video game movie was that one sub-genre that was all-but-impossible to crack. But in an era where everything old is new again, it was an eventuality that we'd eventually get another Tomb Raider movie.
Sadly considering how rare the female-centric action movie remains fourteen years after the first Tomb Raider, it might actually qualify as a major deal for some promising young actress (or Theo James, depending on what route they take) to get to unleash their inner action hero. And it is arguably only through the safety of a reboot of a known entity that we'll get a big-budget adventure video game-based franchise that happens to star a woman. It is unlikely that Hollywood would ever take a chance on Bayonetta but they'll use the safety of a previous franchise, even one that was not very successful the first time around, to give us that butt-kicking video game heroine. Hollywood has become laughably gun-shy about forming new franchises that don't star white dudes, but it may be that they are using the reboot to somewhat expand the horizons.
We'll never get a new explicitly topical socially-conscious action thriller starring a black actor unless it's under the cover of being yet another variation on Shaft. Hollywood would arguably never greenlight a mega-budget futuristic sci-fi horror film starring a woman in this day-and-age, but they'll greenlight a fifth Alien film that brings back Sigourney Weaver as Ripley. And the notion of a big-budget horror comedy featuring four female comedians doing battle with the supernatural would be all-but-impossible save for the cover being provided by Sony's Ghostbusters brand name. Lord help me, but we probably would never get an ensemble sci-fi action hero cast as ethnically diverse as the one we're probably going to get for Lions Gates Entertainment's Power Rangers movie. The good news about all of these reboots, including the seemingly Sarah Connor-centric Terminator: Genisys, is that they are giving Hollywood the cover to make franchises that don't necessarily revolve around white men doing action. The bad news is that they show that Hollywood was clearly both more risk-taking and more diverse before they caught global blockbuster fever.
Clickbait headlines aside, I am not kidding about Kristen Stewart theoretically playing Lara Croft in the new Tomb Raider film. The woman has been on a critical roll lately (Camp X-Ray, Still Alice, and Clouds of Sils Maria, for which she just became the first American actress to win a Ca esar award) and I still think she is a huge reason why Snow White and the Huntsman opened to $55 million in the summer of 2012. I am not sure if she can pull off the character, but frankly I kinda like not knowing (it's why I would prefer a new Indiana Jones a little less predictable than the obviously capable Chris Pratt). Emily Blunt could do it in her sleep and Gugu Mbatha-Raw would be the outside-the-box "Take this movie seriously!" pick (that both are actually British helps), but in terms of box office clout, an automatic fan base, and a deluge of constant free media coverage, well, I think Ms. Stewart getting another high-profile action franchise would be karmic payback for being preemptively removed from the Snow White franchise that she birthed in the first place.
But whomever ends up as Lara Croft, I guarantee that it's the kind of opportunity that they never would have had absent the fact that a comparatively more courageous Hollywood executive decided to make the first Tomb Raider back in the day. And that's both the hidden underside to all of these reboots and the really sad part about Hollywood's mentality today.
Also on Forbes:
