Amazon's Tomb Raider series reportedly 'dead' after tens of millions in development costs resulted in no script

Following years of rumours, Amazon Prime Video officially revealed plans for a new TV series based on the Tomb Raider games in May 2024. The announcement's big hook was Phoebe Waller-Bridge as writer and producer, who's best-known as the creator of Fleabag and head writer of Killing Eve, and amped-up her own fandom for the series: "Lara means a lot to me, as she does to many, and I can't wait to go on this adventure. Bats 'n all."

Well, it was a nice idea. The Daily Mail now cites a source saying that Lara Croft's mooted small screen adventures are "not going ahead", while another source is even more unambiguous: the project is "dead." Neither Prime Video nor Waller-Bridge's representatives have commented.

This is not the first time that rumours have swirled around the production, and whether fairly or not the fingers point at Waller-Bridge's scripts, which were apparently delayed for some time and then judged unsuitable for the project. Prime Video signed up Waller-Bridge to a megabucks exclusivity deal in 2019 worth $20 million a year, but since then it has produced no shows or films from the creator.

That deal was made under the aegis of Jennifer Salke, who also greenlit and was overseeing the Tomb Raider project, and was the head of Amazon Studios until just last week. "[Waller-Bridge] grew up playing Lara Croft/Tomb Raider," said Salke in 2023. "We think it's going to be a huge franchise for us."

Puck's Matthew Belloni, in an article focused on Salke's time at Amazon, makes the whole thing sound like a huge mess: "Tomb Raider, which Waller-Bridge has been working on and which Salke was personally overseeing after announcing a series pickup last May, has now gone through two writers rooms and tens of millions of dollars in development costs. There’s still no script."

Amazon is yet to officially confirm the cancellation. Also in development is a new Tomb Raider game from series veterans Crystal Dynamics, which is being developed on Unreal Engine 5 and, hold on to your hats folks, will feature "mind-bending puzzles," a "wide variety of enemies," and be "a new chapter [in] Lara Croft’s story." That has no release date: but at least it's (probably) still going to happen.