Tomb Raider Movie Up for Bidding War After MGM Loses Rights, Alicia Vikander No Longer Involved

By Jenna Anderson

The live-action future of Tomb Raider just got a lot more complicated. On Thursday, a report from The Wrap revealed that MGM has now lost the film rights to the video game franchise, after releasing one live-action Tomb Raider movie in 2018. According to their reporting, MGM did not officially greenlight a sequel to the film within the allotted window, which was up until May of this year. This has reportedly now started a bidding war with multiple other movie studios to bid on the property. A Tomb Raider sequel had been in development since 2019, with Alicia Vikander set to return as Lara Croft, and Lovecraft Country and Black Canary's Misha Green in talks to write and direct. Now, The Wrap's reporting indicates that Vikander will not be attached to any future installments. 

"With the MGM and Amazon buyout, I have no clue. Now it's kind of politics," Vikander explained in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. "I think Misha and I have been ready, so it's kind of in somebody else's hands, to be honest."

"I've been excited to show the world," Vikander teases of Green's vision. "I love what she's done with Lovecraft Country."

In a social media post last year, Green previously teased that she had delivered the first draft of the sequel's script, and that her working title for the film was Tomb Raider: Obsidian. The sequel is just one of several high-profile projects Green is working on, as she is also writing the script for DC's Black Canary movie, starring Jurnee Smollett.

"Misha [Green] is about to ... A script is coming in very soon. She's extremely hardworking," Vikander confirmed to ComicBook.com in a 2021 interview. "And so, I can't say anything, because like you said, COVID kind of put everything just up in the air. But yeah, I'm excited to read scripts and hope that it's something that we'll find a way to make."

2018's Tomb Raider starred Vikander as Lara Croft, the fiercely independent daughter of a missing adventurer, must push herself beyond her limits when she discovers the island where her father, Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West) disappeared.

What do you think of MGM losing the film rights to Tomb Raider? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

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