A couple that works on video game adaptations together stays together. Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender first worked with each other in Derek Cianfrance‘s The Light Between Oceans a decade ago. They recently reunited to share the screen in director Na Hong-jin‘s divisive new sci-fi movie Hope, which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Vikander and Fassbender are also perhaps the only married couple who starred in two separate video game adaptations that failed to launch franchises in the same decade. Fassbender’s movie, Assassin’s Creed, was released to poor reviews in 2016, and grossed around $240 million worldwide against a reported budget of $125 million. Vikander’s movie debuted two years later. It was more successful with both critics and audiences, and even though it didn’t get a sequel, it seems to be drawing crowds to this day.
This week, Vikander’s movie was among the most-watched titles on the domestic HBO Max charts. According to FlixPatrol, it outperformed Tim Burton‘s legacy sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the blockbuster franchise-starter Despicable Me, the fizzy rom-com Crazy Rich Asians, and the highest-grossing A24 movie ever made, Marty Supreme. We’re talking, of course, about Tomb Raider. The movie was directed by Roar Uthaug, who has had an unusual career trajectory. Typically, non-American directors would make a breakout hit in their respective countries and then be lured to Hollywood with the promise of riches. In the case of Uthaug, he directed Tomb Raider, and then returned to Europe to deliver the most successful non-English language movie in the history of Netflix: Troll.
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He even got to direct a sequel to Troll, a mark of success he couldn’t celebrate with Tomb Raider. The video game adaptation was released in 2018 to mixed reviews, and it ended up grossing $275 million worldwide against a reported budget of around $100 million. The movie now holds a 52% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “Tomb Raider reboots the franchise with a more grounded approach and a star who’s clearly more than up to the task — neither of which are well served by an uninspired origin story.”
After years of uncertainty surrounding Vikander’s return, the franchise is set to be rebooted again, this time with a Prime Video streaming series headlined by Sophie Turner and developed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
- Release Date
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March 16, 2018
- Runtime
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118 minutes
- Director
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Roar Uthaug