With Square Enix's latest Lara Croft video game 'Rise of the Tomb Raider' currently entertaining players on the XBox One console, the adventurous archaeologist once again moves to the front of the zeitgeist. It's no surprise, then, that Warner Bros. and MGM seem to have decided on a director for their long-awaited reboot to the Tomb Raider movie franchise. The two studios are teaming up to produce and release the new take, which is an origin story of sorts, and have partnered up with Graham King of GK Films who owns the rights to the film adaptation. However, they didn't exactly go for a household name with their choice for the helmsman.

As THR reports, Norwegian thriller director Roar Uthaug will take the director's chair for Tomb Raider, making the video game adaptation his first English-language feature. His latest film, The Wave, just opened in Norway this past August and will make its way to American shores in 2016. (You can read our own Perri Nemiroff's TIFF 2015 review of the film, which she said, "obliterates the big budget studio competition.") Uthaug has also dabbled in the horror-thriller genre with Cold Preya children’s adventure in Magic Silver, and a survival action thriller EscapeBut if he's going to make a splash with Tomb Raider, first he's going to need a script.


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Image via Eidos Interactive

Though previous screenwriters Evan Daugherty, Marti Noxon and Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby have all worked on drafts, it looks like Transformers 5 writer Geneva Robertson-Dworet is in negotiations to do another pass on it; Robertson-Dworet's Black List script Hibernation is currently in development.

Little is known about the latest iteration of Lara Croft's cinematic journey except that the story will center on her first-ever adventure. It's also unclear just how much the movie script will pull from the franchise's multiple video games. In Lara's first video game outing back in 1996, she traveled first to Peru to reclaim an artifact known as the Scion; her globe-trotting journey then continued to Greece and Egypt. Then again, they might look to the 2013 video game reboot to inform the cinematic reboot. That storyline saw Lara, a competent but untested archaeology grad student, on an expedition to a fictional island off the coast of Japan. What followed was a series of made-for-the-movies action pieces that Lara somehow manages to survive, thanks to the player.

So while a director is now set and the writers are polishing the script, the major question remains: Who should play Lara Croft? Let us know your suggestions in the comments below! (And if you want a shot at winning your own digital download of 'Rise of the Tomb Raider' and some collectible artwork, make sure to hurry and enter our giveaway here.)


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