7. Tomb Raider (2018)
2018’s Tomb Raider was perhaps not the best-received film of all time. Earning mixed reviews, it proved to be divisive, and that certainly hurt the chances of a sequel. Even so, that wasn’t enough to stop the film itself from teasing further stories for Alicia Vikander’s Lara Croft.
As Tomb Raider acts an origin story for the rebooted version of Lara Croft, it’s perhaps not surprising that it seeks to set up a sequel. However, the implications of Tomb Raider‘s final reveal are that the film’s true villain was hidden in plain sight, and that practically begs for a sequel. Without properly exploring that final stinger, Tomb Raider‘s story rings hollow, and that says that a sequel was seen as inevitable at one point in production.
However, the mixed reception to Tomb Raider complicated things. Though a sequel was announced, it seems to have become stuck in development hell. Most updates point to script issues, and technically, Tomb Raider 2 hasn’t even been greenlit. This makes Tomb Raider seem to be yet another example of an overly ambitious video game adaptation, and that including a sequel tease may have been a way of counting chickens before they’d hatched.
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