Netflix is making a Tomb Raider TV show – and fans of the game should be excited
Set after the last three games
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Netflix has teamed up with the movie studio Legendary to make a new Tomb Raider animated series, it’s been announced. The show will fit in to the continuity established the most recent trilogy of Lara Croft games: 2013’s Tomb Raider,Rise of the Tomb RaiderandShadow of the Tomb Raider.
The series will continue the story of those games – and have no association with the most recent live-action Tomb Raider movie that starred Alicia Vikander. Screenwriter Tasha Huo, who’s working on the upcomingThe Witcher: Blood Originspin-off, is the series' writer and executive producer.
Netflix made a big splash with its surprisingly great adaptation of the Castlevania games, which has now released three seasons on the streaming service. An animated show based on Capcom’s Devil May Cry is also in the works.
Netflix is also making alive-action TV show based on the Assassin’s Creed games. Clearly, the streamer sees the potential in adaptations of video games, despite the famously troubled history of such projects.
Game adaptations will probably get better
Clearly, Netflix isn’t making a whole bunch of game adaptations by accident, and the quality of Castlevania suggests it’s setting a high bar for the way these properties are brought to audiences.
A key thing that’s likely to help these projects is that the people making them are more likely to have grown up playing the games they’re actually adapting. This clearly wasn’t the case with game adaptations from the ’90s or ’00s, which rarely captured the essence of the licenses they were based on, and fell flat as a result.
Do games actually make for good TV shows or movies? That’s a larger question. The most recent Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed films didn’t exactly blow people away. But in a world with so many high-quality superhero movies, often adapted from relatively simple source material, the batting average of these adaptations should be a lot higher than it is now.
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Samuel is a PR Manager at game developer Frontier. Formerly TechRadar’s Senior Entertainment Editor, he’s an expert in Marvel, Star Wars, Netflix shows and general streaming stuff. Before his stint at TechRadar, he spent six years at PC Gamer. Samuel is also the co-host of the popular Back Page podcast, in which he details the trials and tribulations of being a games magazine editor – and attempts to justify his impulsive eBay games buying binges.
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