Last we heard, 18 months or so ago, Buffy The Vampire Slayer writer Marti Noxon was working on the screenplay for the developing relaunch of the Tomb Raider movie franchise. Since then there's been an eerie hush, as of an ancient wind keening gently through long-undiscovered cave systems. But who's this breaking through a crumbling rock wall? It's none other than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Evan Daugherty, who's now making a start on his own version of Lara Croft's next adventure.
Development has been slow on the third Tomb Raider film, which will ignore both the 2001 Angelina Jolie version and its 2003 sequel The Cradle Of Filth Life. The project is coming together at MGM and Warner Bros. under the aegis of producer Graham King. The intended thrust is a young-Lara story along the lines of the most recent videogame instalment from 2013.
That game saw a Lara fresh from the academy, honing her nascent fighting, puzzling and surviving skills following a shipwreck off the coast of Japan. Back at the end of 2011, King was talking up the same reboot angle, saying that although the previous films "weren't disasters, the story that we're telling is really the story before she became Lara Croft, so it is a character piece, which I find interesting. But it's still a lot of action and a lot of fun."
Action, fun and projects skewing young are a clear part of Daugherty's CV so far: along with the Turtles he also penned Snow White & The Huntsman and Divergent, and has** G.I. Joe 3 **in the works. We'll see whether he manages to crack a script that's already got away from Noxon, Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus.