It's been a while since we heard any updates about the Tomb Raider reboot, and we'd hesitate to use that word about this story. But let's say that producer Graham King has just re-emphasised his intentions to continue the adventures of Lara Croft.
King inherited the videogame franchise back in March, when his GK Films banner nabbed the rights from Warner Bros and Square Enix. Since we last reported, the only real news has been that Iron Man writers Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus have scored the screenplay gig. But the task they've been assigned is, as has always been mooted, to completely reboot the franchise as an origin story, and ignore the continuity of the Angelina Jolie instalments Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Filth Life.
"[Those two films] weren't disasters," says King, most recently at work with Martin Scorsese on Hugo, "but 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. It's still a lot of action and a lot of fun, but it does have a lot of really great characters, and for me, it's something very different. I've not really done a movie like that before, but I really gravitated to rebooting this franchise and we're going to give it a shot."
The reboot also, conveniently, means that the role can be recast, probably with a cheaper actress than superstar Jolie. Start with the wild speculation as to who that could be below.
If the new Tomb Raider makes its originally mooted 2013 release date, it'll be following reasonably closely on the heels of the similarly rebooted game franchise. The next console Tomb Raider, with a 21-year-old "fresh-from-the-academy" Lara Croft honing her nascent fighting and puzzling skills following a shipwreck off the coast of Japan, is in development and currently expected for release in the third quarter of 2012. Its recently-trademarked tagline is "A survivor is born".