Around this time next week, with San Diego Comic-Con in full swing, Warner Bros. is expected to host a massive panel in Hall H where they'll show off their wares for the rest of 2017 and on into 2018. The DC slate is expected to represent, as is Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One and the Stephen King adaptation, It. Now we're learning that Roar Uthaug's adaptation of the smash-hit video game series Tomb Raider may also bring footage to the Hall, and leading lady Alicia Vikander is helping to get fans excited. In describing a dangerous stunt that they filmed for the Lara Croft origin story, Vikander teases:
We have a lot of water sequences. I spent my last two days of shooting in a tank, and that was my 16th total day being fully drenched or submerged in the water. ... For one action scene, we used the London venue for Olympic rafting. They threw me down that river --- with my hands tied --- about 50 times. I didn't need to act, just react!
The Tomb Raider movie hasn't chosen to reveal a ton of information yet, so San Diego Comic-Con could really serve as the coming-out party for this new iteration of Lara Croft, the classic video game character first brought to life in the 1996 video game and, later, in a series of Angelina Jolie movies. As Alicia Vikander tells EW ahead of SDCC, her Lara is new to the world of adventurous expeditions, and will be a virgin explorer encountering one of her first missions. Vikander elaborates:
She has all the fierce, tough, curious, intelligent traits, but we've stripped away all of her experience. She hasn't gone on an adventure just yet. She thought he was a stuck up businessperson living in the modern youth culture of suburban London, but then this whole box of information. This is the beginning.
That confirms that the 2018 Tomb Raider movie is an origin story -- a Batman Begins for Lara Croft, so to speak. The official plot synopsis says that the death of Lara's father sends her on a quest to unlock a mystery surrounding the loss... a quest that takes her to a dangerous island off the coast of Japan. But we're unclear who the villain in the movie may be, even as the movie seems to take its cues from the 2013 prequel game, and the 2015 game that was released in honor of the franchise's 20th anniversary.
Stay tuned for next week's Warner Bros. San Diego Comic-Con panel, where we expect the studio to drop its first footage from the 2018 Tomb Raider movie, which we hope will be online shortly after.
