TOMB RAIDER CHRONICLES

Why making the leap to the big screen was the toughest challenge Lara Croft had ever faced

“We should have made a better movie.”

— Tomb Raider producer Lloyd Levin

Computer and video games have never made the best source for movies; whether commercially successful or not, they are, almost without exception, reliably awful. Of course, since Hollywood is a business rather than an artistic endeavour, this has not prevented producers from going big game hunting, trying to turn a profit by turning video games into big screen blockbusters.

Although the computer revolution inspired such films as Tron, The Last Starfighter and WarGames, the first brand name computer game conversion did not appear until 1993’s Super Mario Bros, in which Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo gamely stepped into the shoes of Nintendo’s Italian plumbers, who had taken the gaming world by storm in the mid-1980s. Although the film failed to repeat the console game’s success, big-screen adaptations of Double Dragon and Street Fighter soon followed, and in 1995, British director Paul Anderson’s movie adaptation of the smash hit ‘beat-em-up’ game Mortal Kombat scored a phenomenal opening weekend, despite the universal derision the film received from critics. One would expect such a success to drive Hollywood executives to begin raiding arcades and game stores for ideas — but, aside from a rash of animated and/or direct-to-video releases, from Pokémon to Sonic the Hedgehog and Tekken, the 1990s produced only three other live-action video game adaptations: a Mortal Kombat sequel, a Japanese Fatal Fury film, and an ill-starred adaptation of the popular Wing Commander PC game.

The thinking behind such an enterprise was simple: not only did brands like Super Mario Bros and Mortal Kombat have a ready-made international fan base, the properties tended to appeal most to Hollywood’s most highly prized demographic: young males. If you played computer games, the logic went, you probably also went to the cinema, and vice versa — a theory borne out by the vast number of hit movies, from Ghostbusters to Goldeneye, converted into successful console games. One persistent problem, however, was that video gamers were a notoriously fickle bunch, even in the late 1990s, and by the time a movie adaptation reached the screen, a new game — or even a new console — had reached the shelves. Suddenly, Sonic the Hedgehog looked about as cutting edge as Pong. Eventually, the studios wised up and decided to wait for a gargantuan global gaming success before swooping in for the movie rights. Finally, in November 1996, a star was born, as the mostly male gaming population got its first female hero. Lara Croft was her name. And Tomb Raider was her game.

The brainchild of Simon Channing-Williams, Lara Croft was conceived at the offices of Eidos Interactive in early 1995, and developed as a game by a team of Core Design programmers, including Toby Gard. Part James Bond, part Indiana Jones, part glamour model, the luscious Lara was a twenty-something British aristocrat-cum-adventurer who eschewed the life of a débutante in favour of self-financed expeditions in which she braved lethal traps, dangerous creatures and treacherous rivals in order to steal relics from ancient burial sites.

Lara made her console début in November 1996, in what was essentially a platform game, the platform in question being the PlayStation,1 Sony’s first entry into the risky but potentially lucrative console market, then dominated by Nintendo and Sega. Tomb Raider became an overnight success, propelling the pistol-packing virtual sex symbol Lara Croft to international stardom. Four sequels — Tomb Raider II, Tomb Raider III: Adventures of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation and Tomb Raider Chronicles — appeared year-on-year from 1997 to 2000, by which time Lara had become the most iconic figure in the history of console games, selling more than twenty million games worldwide, appearing on more than 200 magazine covers, advertising products around the world, and appearing as the sole virtual entity on a Time Digital list of the fifty most important people in the cyber industry and a Details magazine list of the world’s sexiest women. In the adventures themselves, she had travelled the globe from the frozen ruins embedded in an Arctic glacier to a forgotten valley filled with supposedly extinct creatures in a South American rainforest. It was only a matter of time before she found her way to Hollywood.

Such was the success of the first Tomb Raider game that rumours of a movie began as early as March 1997, less than six months after Lara Croft’s début appearance. By September of that year, model turned actress Elizabeth Hurley became the first in a long line of actresses to be linked to the role, swiftly followed by such diverse names as Diane Lane, Sandra Bullock, Denise Richards, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Famke Janssen, Anna Nicole Smith, Demi Moore, Jennifer Lopez and Rhona Mitra, who dressed up as Lara at trade shows. Yet it was not until March 1998 that fan site The Croft Times broke the news: after one of the fiercest bidding wars in recent Hollywood history — for which, in a testament to the power of the brand, interested parties were required to come up with not just the money, but also ideas and approaches to the material — the film rights had finally been sold to Paramount Pictures. Tomb Raider: The Movie looked set to become more than virtual reality.

Making its official announcement a few days later, Eidos confirmed that it had entered into an agreement to license the worldwide film rights to Paramount, with plans to produce a live-action feature film, laying rest to rumours that the film might be computer-animated, like Pixar’s recently-released Toy Story. “Mr Lawrence Gordon and Mr Lloyd Levin will produce the action adventure,” the press release stated, referring to the prolific producers behind two 48 HRS films, two Die Hards and two Predators. John Goldwyn, president of Paramount Motion Pictures, said, “We are thrilled by the possibilities of this film project. We are confident that the pairing of Eidos, a leading company in the cutting-edge world of video game (sic), and producers Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin, will result in a ground-breaking live-action adventure movie with worldwide appeal.” Paramount had good reason to put the movie on the development ‘fast track’, since its deal with Eidos stipulated that if the project did not move through development at a certain pace, the rights would automatically expire. Thus, by March, the studio had already hired a screenwriter: Brent V. Friedman, co-writer of the console-game inspired sequel Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.

Friedman’s first draft opens at a London boarding school in 1986 as sixteen year-old Lara, an expert gymnast and A-student, regales her classmates with vivid stories of her parents’ daring exploits. These are soon revealed to be products of her over-active imagination, since her parents (Lord Desmond and Lady Vivian Croft) are not globe-trotting relic hunters but vacationing souvenir collectors, who attempt to make up for years of neglect by offering to take Lara on holiday anywhere in the world. Lara’s choice, Tibet, turns out to be an unfortunate one: their plane crashes in the Himalayas, killing Lady Vivian and injuring Lord Desmond, whom she attempts to pull to safety on a makeshift sled-cum-stretcher. An attack by snow leopards gives audiences an early demonstration of Lara’s precocious resourcefulness, as she uses one of her trademark flares to chase away the predators — only for Lord Croft to expire in front of the gates of a monastery, where a Tibetan monk named Karak takes in the newly-orphaned girl. From here, the script leaps forward thirteen years to the Croft Estate in Hampshire, where an older, wiser Karak now serves as twenty-nine year-old Lara’s trainer, guardian and companion, like Batman’s Ra’s Al-Ghul and Alfred rolled into one.

Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, a grey-haired seventy year-old Scot named Darby Erikson, a role apparently tailor-made for a Sean Connery cameo, sends Lara a videotaped message, alerting her to his discovery of a map which he believes might lead to El Dorado, the fabled South American city of gold. Unfortunately, an unscrupulous Australian named Larsen (the name of the evil Texan from the first Tomb Raider game) is on his trail, and Erikson offers Lara a fifty-fifty split on the lost Incan gold, hoping to appeal to her charitable nature. Against Karak’s advice, Lara takes the job, but before she goes, she pays a visit to Stuart, Liam and Wesley, three engineering eggheads — dead ringers for The X-Files’ Lone Gunmen — who build gadgets and gizmos from designs drawn up by Lara, with whom they are besotted. Before she can leave for Curaçao, where she must meet up with Darby, she returns home to find assassins prowling her estate, now inexplicably rigged with deadly traps. Of course, it’s soon revealed to be the work of Karak and the gardening staff — presumably all part of her training.

Arriving in Curaçao, Lara finds Erikson dead, and narrowly avoids meeting the same fate. Although Erikson’s map has been stolen, she digitally enhances the one on his videotape, and follows it to Ecuador, where she purchases the services of Dodge, a rugged American guide as trustworthy as his name suggests, and sets off up the Napo river in pursuit of the murderous Larsen and his fellow Aussies. After an eventful boat ride, during which the pair fend off deadly alligators and narrowly escape being sucked into a whirlpool, Lara ends up one step ahead of Larsen and his malevolent boss, Malvern, both of whom have failed to realise that magnetic north has shifted four degrees since 1523, when the map was made, and that a lake featured on the map was drained by a volcanic earthquake in 1814. Entering through a volcanic fissure, Lara and Dodge discover Incan stone formations dating from the early 16th century, and make their way through a series of increasingly elaborate and ingenious traps. Finally breaching the tomb of Manco, an Incan king, Lara discovers that El Dorado does not mean ‘Golden City,’ but ‘Golden Man’ — a reference to Manco himself, who discovered the secret of alchemy, turning base metals into gold. She offers Dodge the same fifty-fifty split Erikson offered her, if he will accompany her on the next stage of her journey: a trip even further into darkest Peru to search for Manco’s alchemical device, a magical bowl known as ‘The Black Veil’.

Of course, there are further revelations to come. No sooner have Lara and Dodge found the magical device than Malvern and Larsen turn up to claim their prize, revealing Dodge to be a traitor in their employ. Dodge regrets his betrayal, however, having grown fond of Lara during their shared exploits, and engineers her escape, getting himself shot in the process. With echoes of her struggle to save her father, Lara refuses to leave Dodge behind, dragging him to safety and sneaking aboard Malvern’s ship, where a last revelation awaits her: that Malvern is using the Black Veil not to turn non-precious metals into gold, but into an altogether more lucrative, dangerous and distinctly twentieth century treasure: weapons grade plutonium! Several daring escapes and one nuclear explosion later, Lara returns home, where she swaps her trademark outfit — shorts, a form-fitting Lycra top, boots and mirror shades — for a long evening dress, to attend a society cocktail party thrown by her paternal aunt. After giving her bemused aunt the Black Veil for safe keeping, Lara makes her final escape — to a pub, where she fulfills an earlier promise to share a pint with ‘The Gadget Boys’ — further endearing herself to them by downing hers in one.

Friedman delivered his 108-page first draft on 17 July 1998. By 1 October, the popular website Ain’t It Cool had posted a withering script review, courtesy of ‘Agent 4125.’ “I’m sorry to report that the content is every bit as old and dusty as the ancient artefacts that Lara pursues in her gaming adventures,” the reviewer claimed, taking issue with Friedman’s deviation from previously known Tomb Raider lore, such as the way Lara Croft’s parents are killed. “On its own, this would only be a small matter, but there are plenty of other deviations and a general disregard for the Tomb Raider mythos throughout the script.” Agent 4125 dismissed the Lara/Karak relationship as “an awkward contrivance” and “a lame take-off of the whole David Carradine/Grasshopper schtick from Kung-Fu,” and likened Karak’s surprise attack on Lara at Croft Mansion to Kato ambushing Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films.

By the time the story gets to South America, Agent 4125 went on, “it seems like a mix of Predator-style chase set-pieces in the jungle, and an obligatory series of tricks and traps as Lara navigates her way through a subterranean temple.” (But not, one assumes, in a good way.) The reviewer acknowledged, grudgingly, the fact that Friedman’s greatest challenge arguably lay in the fact that, with the exception of the gender of its hero, Tomb Raider was a thinly-disguised knock-off of the Indiana Jones movies, “but Friedman doesn’t even seem to be trying — [Lara] even has a colourful peasant guide to follow her around and be amazed by her ingenuity in defeating the various traps (just like Satipo at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark).” Although Agent 4125 conceded that Lara’s level of flirtatious banter with Dodge was “about the one part of her character that they got right,” the rest of her characterisation was “wrong, wrong, wrong... she relies way too much on contrived James Bond-style high-tech gadgets than her own ingenuity and her motivation is... well, a mystery. It’s never really explained why she does these things that she does, or who it is she’s trying to help. She just kinda... does them.” Summing up, the reviewer described the script as “shoddy... a cross between Allan Quatermain (remember that?) and Anaconda, with lots of steamy jungle, perilous situations and a whole ton of characters you really couldn’t care less about.”

Clearly, Agent 4125 did not appreciate the obstacles in Friedman’s path, nor the structural gymnastics and character revisionism that might be necessary to convert a one- (or, at best two-) dimensional computer game character into a three-dimensional live-action movie icon. One obvious challenge was that, in the games, Lara’s is a largely solitary pursuit (much like gaming itself), making it difficult to create effective scenarios for dialogue, a movie mainstay. Friedman solves the problem by making Lara reactive rather than pro-active in verbal situations, preferring to let actions speak louder than words. And action is the operative word, as Lara tackles tricks and traps, each highly evocative of her console-based adventures, with an equally typical combination of problem-solving skills and gymnastic expertise.

Scenes most typical of Lara’s games heritage include a two-gun shoot-out with subterranean rats, a scuba diving sequence complete with harpoon gun and modified oxygen tank, and a sliding wall trap which snags her trademark pony-tail; these, along with quips like “Next time don’t send boys to do a girl’s work,” and Lara’s flirtatious dialogue with Dodge, seemed to prove that Friedman had done his homework, capturing the elusive spirit of Lara Croft in word and deed. Nevertheless, on 11 December 1998, a little over two months after Ain’t It Cool published Agent 4125’s negative review, the same site reported that Friedman had left the project, with another pseudonymous scooper (‘ArchChancellor Ridcully’) implying a causal link between one fan’s assessment of a first draft script and Friedman’s subsequent departure. Not so, says Friedman.

“I’d love to give you the whole story, but I’ll spare myself the agony,” he told Premiere magazine. The writer went on to explain that, twenty minutes after Paramount approved his script, he received a call from producer Lawrence Gordon, who asked him to “forget what Paramount says” and come up with more economically viable ideas. The studio, meanwhile, insisted that he continue working on the original concept. “The last thing you want to do is get caught in these tug-of-wars,” Friedman added, “because you’re a writer, a nobody — just a casualty of war.” Friedman did, however, try to reach a compromise with a second take on the film, but a week after Paramount approved the new draft, Eidos — which retained approval over script, director and star — rejected the script, for unspecified reasons. “My sense is, of all the people I met with, only one of the core group of producers and executives had played the game,” Friedman explained. “But everybody has a different interpretation of what will make a lot of money.”

In the meantime, Paramount had hired a female screenwriter, former X-Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation scriptwriter Sara B. Charno (now Sara B. Cooper), to work on an alternative take. When she struck out, the studio knew that if the next writer did not hit a home run, it was game over. Thus, they went straight to the A-list, hiring Steven de Souza, who had worked with Gordon on such blockbusters as Die Hard and The Running Man, and had previously tackled another computer games conversion, Street Fighter. “I was hired in September 1998 to do a story, treatment, draft, rewrite and polish,” says de Souza. “All that took six months, and I turned in my revised, polished script the first week of March 1999. The reaction to the script was universally positive, and it was the document that Stephen Herek read and which he signed on to film.” In other words, he adds, “My script was the one that broke the dam of all the Development Hell.”

By this time, de Souza says that rising star Angelina Jolie, who had co-starred in Pushing Tin, The Bone Collector and Girl, Interrupted, was everyone’s first choice for Lara. No mention was made of Jolie, however, in a Variety story, dated 11 April 1999, which reported that Stephen Herek, director of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Mr. Holland’s Opus, was close to a deal to direct the Tomb Raider movie, with summer 2000 the target release date. “Several scribes took a shot at adapting the vidgame,” the report stated, “[but] it wasn’t until Steven de Souza submitted his draft that Paramount deemed the project ready for a director to come on board, according to Paramount Motion Picture Group president John Goldwyn.”

‘Necros,’ a script reviewer for the website Coming Attractions, shared Goldwyn’s enthusiasm. “Thankfully,” the review began, “de Souza’s Tomb Raider does not begin with a silly and unnecessary backstory on Lara Croft. After a short ‘hook’ to set up the bad guys, we plunge right into a near-perfect cinematic realization of the best parts of the original TR computer game as Lara makes her way through the cavernous tomb of King Philip and retrieves the King’s funeral mask. When she returns home, she learns that her life may be in danger, and during the subsequent exhibition at the British Museum, a foreign minister from Kafiristan (the small third world country that Lara took the mask from) explains to Lara the mask’s significance — that it may lead the way to the long-lost library of Alexander the Great. Lara’s old nemesis, Larson (the arrogant Texan featured in the original game), steals the mask from the museum that night, and it is now up to Lara to find the lost library before Larson can. She gathers a small expedition team and sets out to find it, running into many difficult obstacles — some expected and some quite unexpected — along the way.

“Overall, this is an excellent script,” the review concluded. “De Souza does a nice job of characterising Lara, and while the plot has touches of both the Indiana Jones and James Bond films, it never feels like a rip-off of either series. Nor does the script suffer from an overdose of humour (although Lara has some great one-liners). It’s a good, solid action-adventure story with a refreshing emphasis on adventure. With steady-handed direction and some good stunt choreography, TR could turn out to be one of summer 2000’s real gems.”

Despite the anonymous Coming Attraction critic’s approval — Necros could, after all, have been de Souza in disguise — producer Lloyd Levin remained unconvinced that de Souza’s draft was ready for a green light. “We hadn’t gotten to the place where we were embracing what was special about the game, which was the character and how contemporary she was,” he told Premiere magazine. “We kept falling back on stories and types of movies that were familiar.” This was, perhaps, understandable, given that Tomb Raider itself had been a deliberate attempt to remake Indiana Jones in the image of a sexy young woman, and that all versions of the game had borrowed freely from adventure movies from Raiders of the Lost Ark to Romancing the Stone. In other words, the producers were trying to make a movie based on a video game inspired by movies. How to make that seem original?

Herek, of course, had his own opinions of what a Tomb Raider movie should look like. By this time, however, Steven de Souza had technically fulfilled his contract, giving Herek licence to bring in a new screenwriter, who would be cheaper and more accessible than the producer’s choice. “Another motivation may have been — and of course I’m guessing here — Herek secretly wanted a writer less firmly in the producer’s camp than me,” de Souza explains. “My having done half a dozen pictures with Larry Gordon made Herek start to think that perhaps he should have a writer on board who would report to him, and not Gordon.” It didn’t help matters that, during this period, Gordon’s comic book adaptation Mystery Men belly-flopped at the box office, weakening Gordon’s standing with Paramount. De Souza says that Gordon wanted to re-hire him, “possibly because I would be his guy in the shifting sand of studio politics post-Mystery Men,” but that his hands were tied. In any case, de Souza was no longer available, being buried in pre-production on his own film, Possessed, which he was also directing.

Whatever the reason, Gordon and Levin gave the next draft to two screenwriters at the opposite end of the spectrum: Patrick Massett and John Zinman, who had adapted the pioneering wireframe arcade game Battle Zone into a screenplay for Lloyd Levin. At the pitch for Battle Zone, Massett and Zinman recall being drawn to a life-size cutout of Lara Croft behind Lloyd Levin’s desk, and — even though they were unfamiliar with the game — decided to pitch for Tomb Raider: The Movie. As Zinman told Creative Screenwriting, “[The producers] said, ‘The situation is this: we’re running out of rope; we’re looking to make a deal with someone who can give us some security.’ They were very up front in saying, ‘No one is going to roll the dice on you at this point.’ Massett and Zinman chose not to take ‘no’ for an answer, writing a forty-page ‘scriptment’ — roughly half way between a treatment and a script — while their agent set up a pitch meeting with the producers. “Scene for scene, beat for beat, we told [them] the movie... from the opening to the final sequence,” Massett said of the meeting. “We were riffing off each other the whole time. It was tight, like a forty-minute Jimi Hendrix show.” According to Massett, neither producer spoke during the pitch, or after it; yet before the writers had left the studio lot, their agent called to say they had the go-ahead to turn their pitch into a script.

Only when they had the assignment did Massett and Zinman actually sit down to play the games, which Massett summarised as “a lot of puzzle solving; a bad guy tries to stop her, or beat her to the prize.” The film, they felt, should be equally simple: “It was a franchise. It was cool. It was a chick as an action star.” As Zinman explained, “The challenge is to create a story that’s not going to alienate the fan base. But by the same token we wanted to expand the audience to people who weren’t familiar with the game. Something we did incorporate was Lara’s intelligence,” he added. “Her success as an action hero is that she isn’t just brawn. She figures things out; she’s the smartest one in the room. I think that’s the challenge of the game, that’s why people get addicted to it.”

Seventeen days after getting the job, Massett and Zinman turned in their first draft, at which point, according to Zinman, they were “hailed as heroes.” Not so, says de Souza. “Massett and Zinman’s first attempt was not well received,” he counters, adding that it followed his draft in general, keeping the Alexander the Great idea but changing the ‘MacGuffin’ — Hitchcock’s term for the motivating factor of most stories — from Archimedes’ Mirror to Achilles’ Shield, an artefact Massett and Zinman learned about in a PBS special on the Macedonian conqueror. “Of course, the whole point of the MacGuffin isn’t what it is, but how it is used and where it takes you,” says de Souza. “So my original idea — that Alexander the Great stumbled on something very dangerous and hid it to protect civilization, hiding the only clue under the sea — led to a series of scenes and adventures that hardly changed in draft after draft.”

Massett and Zinman were subsequently replaced by Face/Off scribes Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, who worked with Herek developing a new draft, subsequently reviewed by one ‘Darwin Mayflower’ on the website Screenwriters Utopia. “The script opens in Macedonia, 632 BC. Alexander the Great is mad with power: he has an ancient, supernatural breastplate, the Shield of Achilles, that makes him invulnerable. Alexander has begun to kill his own people, to feed the demon-dog Cerberus, and two of his men, Priam and Sophius, decide enough is enough and plot to take him down. They eventually do, with the help of one of Alexander’s consorts, and break the breastplate into three pieces and bury them at the furthest reaches of the earth.”

Cut to the present day, in which Lara Croft is re-imagined as a Robin Hood-style figure who returns stolen artefacts to their rightful owners — the Shield of Achilles being the subject of her latest quest. “Her frail Uncle Charles Powell hooks her up with the bookish Dr Alexis Toulin, who works for the Greek Ministry of Antiquities. Alexander’s tomb has been found and Alexis fears that the three sections of breastplate, one of which Lara unknowingly found, might end up in the wrong hands (anyone who possesses it is invulnerable, remember).” Lara sets off for Morocco with Dr Toulin, gatecrashing a party taking place above a cave containing the second piece of the breastplate. Ultimately, Mayflower added, “Dr Toulin winds up being a criminal. Her Uncle is in on it, too (he’s dying and wants the breastplate so he can go on living). Lara gets together with the good-guy-she-thought-to-be-bad, [Theo] Rooker. And together ... they track down the Shield of Achilles and try to stop Alexis and his dangerous wife.”

Mayflower went on to describe Werb and Colleary’s take on Lara herself as “a wonderful contradiction. She’s beautiful but alone; she can speak six languages and knows her mythology like an average person knows his days of the week ... she’s ready to take on any challenge, but won’t accept a man in her life. Lara’s parents died in a plane crash,” he added. “Their bodies were never discovered and their empty mausoleum is like a self-torturing device to remind Lara her life with her parents never had a conclusion. Her butler dramatically tells her she helps find things for people because she’s really looking for her parents.” Unfortunately, he added, “Lara’s problems aren’t dealt with, and she just becomes another piece in the plot-puzzle. The lost-parents rap is also a little stupid: sure, it sucks to never find your parents’ bodies, but she has accepted they are dead, and grieving over finding the mangled corpses of your loved ones isn’t the best activity for a buxom heroine. Lara later runs into — wow! totally by accident! — those dead parents. And it’s once again not a stroke of paint in Lara’s personality, but another plot point.

“You’re not asking much with a Tomb Raider movie,” Mayflower added. “You want to sit down and see [Lara] kill bad guys, just make it under a gate as it’s closing, and spout some cool one-liners. That the authors couldn’t give us at least that much is both disappointing and baffling.” Although impressed by an early scene which places Lara in an ancient-ruins-themed casino — and another in which Lara is tortured by being tied to a post while centipedes crawl up her body, only to crush one of them with her ample cleavage — Mayflower’s overall disappointment was clear. “There’s just not much going on,” he lamented. “And when it does, it’s Lara in some hackneyed action scene we’ve watched twenty years ago and were just as bored then as we are now.”

According to de Souza, this draft spent a huge amount of time, “like twenty-eight pages!” in ancient times with Alexander and company, “sort of like The Mummy did before Brendan Fraser even showed up. This drove the studio crazy, because they were negotiating to pay Angelina Jolie a record price to be in a ninety-minute movie, and now at the eleventh hour Herek wanted to take away a third of her time on screen, and replace it with millions of dollars of actors, sets and costumes that were all — essentially — a prologue!” Nevertheless, The Mummy had, against most predictions, proven to be a huge international success for a rival studio, Universal, and it was perhaps unsurprising that Paramount were willing to take the Tomb Raider film in a new direction. In the meantime, however, Herek dropped out to direct Mark Wahlberg in Rock Star, leaving Tomb Raider with a ‘hard’ release date — a target date which a studio has marked out for a particular film’s release, and which it us unwilling to shift — but no director. “It was the worst situation,” de Souza states. “The movie was due out the following summer, so it had to start in September or October of that year. That’s so far into the process, you can’t even shop for directors — even if you say, ‘Who’s available?’ and start interviewing people, that takes six weeks.”

It was at this point that someone at the studio remembered that British director Simon West, who had made the smash hit Con Air and, for Paramount, The General’s Daughter, was stuck in Development Hell on another Paramount project. West owed the studio a movie, so he would be available relatively cheaply, given that the price for that unnamed film had already been fixed. Thus, says de Souza, “Paramount threw Simon West off a postponed film also on the lot and rolled his deal over to Tomb Raider — a move which, at the time, seemed both wise and efficient.” West, however, did not like the direction the Tomb Raider script was taking. “The old drafts had a lot of ‘Mary Poppins’ representations of England,” he told Premiere. “It was fairly horrendous. I said, ‘Look, I want to change everything but the title and the character.’ I had to come up with it very quickly.”

“As soon as he was locked into it,” says de Souza, ”he took off his nice guy mask and completely hi-jacked the movie. He says all the right things to get the job, and once he’s in he says, ‘It’s a piece of shit. I could write the script myself.’” Whether West was aggrieved that he had been manoeuvred into directing a potential blockbuster under the terms of an existing deal — meaning that he would not get the kind of payday he expected from a film like Tomb Raider — or whether he genuinely did not like the script, was unclear. In any case, says de Souza, “he demanded he be given an additional paycheck to write his own script, in lieu of the one already in ‘prep’ — mine.”

West, who had spent more than a year developing a film based on 1960s TV series The Prisoner, made no secret of his initial scepticism at the prospect of taking on Tomb Raider. “Every time it came up I thought that we must really be desperate if we’re looking to video games for film ideas,” he commented. “I was a real prejudiced snob about it. No film based on a video game has ever worked.” Neither did reading earlier drafts endear the project to him. “[One of them] had scenes with people visiting the Queen and drinking tea,” West told Dreamwatch magazine. “It was a tragedy waiting to happen.”

Describing his own vision of Tomb Raider: The Movie as “James Bond on acid” and “James Bond as it should be — slightly sadistic, supercool, with a surreal element,” he said he had read all of the previous drafts, and decided that Massett and Zinman’s was the one he liked best. As a result, West holed up in a London hotel room and bashed out yet another script, which — according to a synopsis posted on Coming Attractions — combined elements of several earlier drafts. “The plot, briefly, involves adventuress/magazine editor Lara Croft’s pursuit of the death mask of Alexander the Great,” the report stated. “The mask was split into three pieces when Alex’s hidden tomb was sealed to protect it from raiders (the closing of the tomb opens the film). The pieces of the mask were spread around the world. Lara unwittingly has one piece of the mask in a relic she takes in her introductory action sequence. The piece comes to her attention when a Greek man named Darius offers to buy the piece and, when she refuses to sell, he steals it. Lara then has to figure out what the piece is and find the other pieces before Darius.

“Darius wants to find the tomb because Alexander is said to have possessed the Shield of Achilles, which makes its holder invulnerable. Lara makes good use of her family butler, Jeeves, and a reluctant archaeologist friend she once had an affair with, Justin, to hunt down the mask pieces. The movie is full of action sequences with Lara finding her way through the tombs with Darius’ men in pursuit... The final showdown is a bit hokey, as a plunge off a cliff ends with Lara saving herself with the shield. The plot is really an excuse for the action scenes, which range from the Middle East to the Khyber Pass to some nifty underwater work. The biggest problem with the movie is that Lara herself does not act particularly sexy and there is no real heat between her and Justin or even her and Darius. It’s very PG in that respect. Fans may like to know that the script does show Lara grieving for her dead, rich parents and has her work as editor of an adventure magazine where she publishes accounts of her exploits. All in all,” the report concluded, “this project needs some more work to make it stand out. Otherwise, it’ll turn out to be just another action flick.”

Few were surprised when the release date slipped again, this time to the summer of 2001. Perhaps nervous that the studio may tire of their inability to shepherd the film into production, Gordon and Levin called in a series of ‘closers’ — Mission: Impossible 2 scribe Brannon Braga, future Avatar co-screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis, and Academy Award nominee Paul Attanasio (Quiz Show) — who continued to massage the script. According to de Souza, Mike Werb and Michael Colleary worked briefly with West, an experience they reportedly described as “horrible”. Says de Souza, “Mike Werb said, ‘The movie’s called Tomb Raider, and there’s no tombs and there’s no raiding,’ and Simon West said, ‘That’s my plan — I don’t want to be obvious.’ Other writers had told me that they would sit in a room with Simon West where they would say, ‘You can’t do that, it ruins the surprise,’ and he said, ‘I don’t want any surprises in this movie — that’s twentieth century. This is a twenty-first century movie. We’re not here to surprise or play games with the audience or shock them or talk about characters and motivation — this is just pure kinetic energy and momentum.’”

Basically, de Souza adds, “West went back to the scripts that were abandoned, and did a cut and paste and put them all together, and did his own rewriting across the top of it. He invented the storyline about the antediluvian Conan-esque Hyborean Age prehistory ‘triangle of light’ that was made from a meteor, and (with Angelina) added all the father/daughter scenes. Nobody wanted him to do that, but nobody could stop him. The studio was happy [with the script], but he kept saying, ‘I want another rewrite.’ He was driving them crazy.” Lloyd Levin sees it differently. “From a creative point of view, Simon totally turned it around.”

West worked with Massett and Zinman on yet another draft, delivered in March 2000, keeping the theme of immortality from the ‘Shield of Achilles’ drafts, but replacing it with West’s idea: a search for an artefact called ‘The Triangle of Light’ by the ‘Illuminati’ — a secret order described in the Illuminatus trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson (for whom a newly-introduced character, Wilson, is presumably named). Said Zinman, “When we met with Simon his idea was the sacred shape, and there’s only one sacred shape and that’s the triangle. The trinity, the number three, the pyramids, the Masons, Christianity, the ‘all-seeing eye’ — it’s just naturally there... We wrote in prose form what the mythology was, who the ‘people of the light’ were, what the pieces [of the triangle] were. I’ve got to tip my hat to Simon West,” he added. “He said, ‘Let’s take it out of the known. Let’s make it more mystical and unknown.’ I think it was a wise choice.”

Despite all these revisions, de Souza says that the script’s basic shape and flavour remained close to his original: “We were still chasing after something Alexander had hidden, and Lara had a love/hate trust/don’t trust relationship with a guy she was travelling with in partnership.” West renamed all the supporting characters, including two held over from the de Souza draft — the cybernetic trainer, JEEVES, and the male lead, Kincaid — which he changed to ‘SIMON’ and ‘West’ respectively. “I thought it revealing that he put the name ‘Simon’ on the robot, which is a mindless drone, and ‘West’ on the character who vacillates,” says de Souza wryly, “because the film demonstrated completely mechanical storytelling, combined with a lot of indecision about which way to go.”

As rewriting continued, so did the search for someone to fill Lara’s boots. Despite earlier negotiations with Angelina Jolie, an edition of Entertainment Weekly dated 2 March 2000 quoted Simon West as saying that he was looking for an unknown actress to play what he described as the “James Bond of archaeology”, for a June start date. “To some, she’s the perfect woman, though others would say she’s a total male fabrication of what a woman should be,” he added. “We don’t want to ram a Hollywood star into this thing, because Lara is visually [known].”

West did not reveal how he planned to raise the money for a globe-trotting action movie with expensive set pieces, however, and the following day, Variety reported that Jolie — who was just two weeks away from winning an Academy Award for Girl, Interrupted — was in “final negotations” to play Lara Croft. Tomb Raider fans were divided on Jolie’s casting: some celebrated the idea of an actress as intrinsically sexy and cool as Jolie playing Lara; others were concerned that her off-screen activities — she sported numerous tattoos (including a large one bearing her then-husband Billy Bob Thornton’s name), and had admitted a proclivity for self-harm and knife wounds inflicted during sex — did not sit well with a game enjoyed by millions of pre-adolescent boys.2

“It was always Angelina,” West later admitted to Empire. “I mean, Lara sleeps with knives and doesn’t take shit from anybody. That’s A. J. down to a tee.” Nevertheless, it took some time for West to convince Jolie that the role fit her like a tank top and a pair of hot pants. “At first I thought Tomb Raider was a really bad idea,” she told Empire. “Like most people I thought, ‘Well, this is going to be silly and campy, and only based on that little outfit and the body.’ But then Simon and I talked about her, about her relationship with her father, and she became kind of beautiful to me.”

Certainly, one element of the Tomb Raider deal which may have helped swing the newly-minted Academy Award-winner into the film was the opportunity to work with her father, fellow Oscar-winner Jon Voight, from whom she had been estranged for many years. “It’s taken us a long time to figure out if we could do a project together, for many different reasons,” she said, “and it’s very special. It’s also very scary, because our relationship is very, very similar to these two people, [in that] through my whole life, I’ve followed in his footsteps. And he’s somebody who searches the world for information, different religions, different places, different myths.”

West went a step further than casting Voight as Lara’s explorer father, as de Souza explains: “One of the things that gave him leverage was she wanted to work with her father, so he said, ‘I’ll put your father in the movie, and I’ll let you write your own scenes with your father.’ So she and her father wrote those scenes they were in together. It shows how stupid everybody is because nowhere in the source material does it say the father’s dead,” he adds. “So if they want the father in the movie, let him be alive in the movie. They could have had a scene like in The Mask of Zorro, where the father dies in the daughter’s arms. Instead, they get the father in the movie the hardest way possible, with all these dream sequences and flashbacks.”

Despite de Souza’s reservations, regular Ain’t It Cool script reviewer ‘Moriarty’ was impressed by the shooting draft, not least the thematic resonance Massett and Zinman had been aiming for. “This script is first and foremost about Lara coming to some sense of peace with the loss of her father,” wrote Moriarty. “This entire adventure serves only to take Lara to the next step, to get her over this particular pain. Loss informs her every choice in the movie, and it’s one of the things that elevates the material, that gives it some heft and resonance.” As Massett explained, “It was always our intention for Lara to have a connection to the past, to the present, and to how those worlds collided and what that meant. The Triangle of Light held the theme to understand God, or man’s duty to understand the nature of Nature itself. That was the theme that came through.” Moriarty also approved of the script’s “nimble wit”, which included a sight gag where Lara, considering the options for her next mission, opens a file containing pictures of Egypt: “Right away, she tosses it aside, a welcome sight for anyone who’s seen the Indy films and the new Mummy.” As for the supporting characters, he thought the Q-like Bryce was an interesting foil for the heroine, noted the effective “sexual energy” between Lara and Alex Marrs, and highlighted her “antagonistic sparring” with the Illuminati villain Manfred Powell.

“I was surprised by how much I invested in Lara and her father by the end of the film,” he added. “There’s difficult choices that she makes that mark her as a hero of real conscience and strength, rather than just a babe in shorts who’s good at killing thugs. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some talky chick flick by any stretch of the imagination. There’s several great action set pieces... [and] each of them defines Lara or her relationships with Bryce, Powell, Marrs, and even her father. None of them are just action for the sake of it, and that’s what intrigues me most about this film... These set pieces are all built on clever ideas, smart in both text and subtext. Lara’s got a touch of angst in the film, as befits a story driven by the memory of her dead father, but she also loves what she does. She’s not Batman... She seems to attack situations with two hands, digging in, drunk on raw experience. Jolie’s got the exact right edge to play the role as written. There’s something in Lara that seems almost out of control, and that makes her dangerous, and that makes her even more interesting.”

Moriarty also admitted to being “unexpectedly moved” by the finale, in which the heroes and villains vie for The Power of God in The Tomb of Ten Thousand Shadows. “The choices faced in this scene make the whole film pay off... There’s a reason they didn’t just pour a pair of tits into the lead role of this film. Jolie’s got to go through some pretty harrowing beats to get to her final destination... The Lara Croft that comes out the other side is both tougher than she’s ever been, and finally able to embrace some sort of life away from danger and death.”

This shooting draft — credited to Massett, Zinman, Laeta Kalogridis and West himself — was dated 28 July 2000, just three days before production officially commenced at Britain’s Pinewood Studios, before setting off for such diverse locations as Cambodia and Iceland. “Originally, I wrote the idea to be in China, and I was going to use the Terracotta Army as an opposing force,” West commented later. “But it was not possible to organise getting to China in time. And also, when I thought about it, I realised that the Great Wall would only give me one big element, and I needed so much more for that sequence. So I started looking around to other places, because the alternative was to build the Great Wall in Scotland, and the prospect of shooting in Scotland in winter didn’t appeal to me that much, and I didn’t think it was going to look that warm and ‘Chinese-y!’ So I looked around the world for other great settings and I happened to come across Cambodia.”

As filming continued, numerous cuts made to the budget and schedule meant that there would be fewer pieces to the plot puzzle. As Zinman explained, “We wrote a script that was just huge, and it needed to be scaled back. They had to omit a few costly scenes.” Thus, he added, “In the shooting draft it’s only two pieces of the triangle, [which is] symbolically less satisfying, because it’s only two, not three. But of course, we only have 120 minutes and only have however many millions of dollars.” Further cuts were made for budgetary reasons, including what would appear to be a crucial flashback in which Lord Croft (Jon Voight) explains the mythology, mysticism and might of the ‘Triangle of Light’ to seven year-old Lara, illustrated by cutaways of the action he narrates.

“Long, long ago, a meteor crashed to Earth,” he explains. “An ancient people excavated the meteor, and found, buried at its core, a mysterious, crystallised metal. They worshipped the metal for its magical powers, forging it into a sacred shape — a perfect triangle. They engraved upon it an emblem of its great power,” he goes on, referring to the ‘all-seeing eye’. “The mysterious Triangle induced great insights in its guardians, great knowledge in mathematics and science. They called themselves ‘The People of the Light’. But others heard of the power of the Triangle and wanted it for themselves. A great war raged, and finally their beautiful Spiral City suffered under a terrible siege. As fire engulfed their homes, the sun appeared to go out. It was a total eclipse. Believing the end of the world to be upon them, their High Priest prayed desperately to the heavens — ‘Let my enemies be vanquished.’ And with the words still on his lips, his prayers were answered in a horrific instant!

“The High Priest knew that this power should not be held by any man,” he continues. “A power that could explode the human mind. The power of God. He ordered the Triangle cut into two smaller, right-angled triangles. One half was to stay at the Temple, while the other half was to be hidden at the end of the earth to prevent the Triangle’s strange power from being used to change the fate of Humankind. In defiance of the High Priest, the craftsmen who had cut the Triangle in half secretly made a highly advanced clock to serve as a guide to find the hidden piece, and preserve the Triangle’s awesome powers for future generations of their kind. They called themselves ‘The Illuminati’. They all realised that the exact alignment of the planets necessary to activate the Triangle would not be due for another 5,000 years. But eventually, after many centuries, the People of the Light, the craftsmen, and their incredible Spiral City, and of course, their secret clock, disappeared, evaporating from the pages of history.”

With this sequence cut, says de Souza, the search for the Triangle becomes meaningless, since “it was never clear what it could do. It just said [it had] ‘the power of a God’, or ‘power over time and space’, but what does that mean, really? Stephen Hawking has that, and he doesn’t even get out of his wheelchair!” De Souza also felt that the villains were “campy and arch,” likening the tone to the ill-fated big-screen adaptation of classic 1960s television caper The Avengers. In addition, he says, “When I was on the picture they were saying, ‘We want to get out of England by the end of the first act; we’ve got to be out of England by page thirty.’ So I said ‘OK.’ And this one here it’s barely ninety minutes long, but I think it really is like forty minutes before she leaves her house.” Only three elements of de Souza’s script survived to the shooting script: Lara’s fight against her household cybernetic opponent, her acrobatic gun battle with the invaders of Croft Hall, and the Ray Harryhausen homage in which the statues coming to life. This was not deemed sufficient for the Writers Guild of America to award de Souza a screen credit; instead, Werb, Colleary and Sara B. Cooper share story credit, with Massett, Zinman and West himself receiving credit for the screenplay. Screenwriters commonly fight for credit on a film, often claiming the best ideas as their own; in this case, de Souza says, “all the writers, who maybe under normal circumstances would say, ‘That son of a bitch rewrote me and changed me,’ were united in their dismay of this script, that had not been written so much as unwritten.”

As if the development had not been hellish enough, problems plagued the production, with the Sunday Express breaking the news on 8 October 2000 that raw footage from the film had been stolen during a daring raid worthy of Lara herself. “Burglars escaped with a rucksack containing sensitive video tapes and a wallet during a burglary at the home of director Simon West,” the tabloid reported, quoting West as saying he was woken by an intruder breaking the front door of his £1.1 million three-bedroomed home in Notting Hill, London. “I was in bed at home when I heard a huge crash downstairs at about 2am,” he said. “I got up and went down but they just ran out. I didn’t see them — just the front door swinging. I must have missed them by a split second. They snatched my bag, which had two or three tapes including all the film so far — literally about half the film. It was everything we’ve done in the last two months.” Two months later, the film made headlines again when Angelina Jolie injured her ankle on location, causing a week’s delay, and adding $1 million to the already bloated budget, now edging towards $100 million.

Worse was to come, as one of West’s assistants filed a lawsuit against Paramount, the director, and Bobby Klein, reportedly a former “psychologist specialising in stress management” who acts as West’s manager (and received a screen credit as co-producer of the Tomb Raider film). Klein had hired Dana Robinson, a twenty-five year-old agent’s assistant for Creative Artists Agency, but after quitting her job and relocating to London to work on the production, she became uncomfortable with Klein’s sexual advances and other inappropriate behaviour. In a twenty-three-page complaint filed by her lawyers against Klein, West and Paramount, Robinson claimed emotional distress, sexual harassment and wrongful dismissal, since — she alleged — her complaints led to her being given the sack. Attorneys representing Paramount and West counter-claimed that she was dismissed after three months for poor work performance, while West has said that lawsuits like this come with the territory. “I’ve learned that when you get into this position in the entertainment industry, you get targeted,” he told Premiere. “It’s just one of those unfortunate things that when people don’t work out, they look for someone to blame.” Nevertheless, says de Souza, “I do not think there is parking space on the Paramount lot for Simon West.”

In addition to such problems, de Souza alleges that West went “many, many millions over budget and two months over schedule, so the minute he turned in his interminable 130-minute cut, Paramount showed him the door. They didn’t even let him in the editing room.” Whether or not this is true — West was later invited back to direct minor reshoots in London, and provides director’s commentary for the DVD — Paramount brought in Stuart Baird, a veteran trouble-shooting editor with credits as diverse as Superman, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Mission: Impossible 2, to re-cut the entire movie. “Stuart Baird has an executive producer credit on the movie,” notes de Souza, “but all he did was re-cut the movie down to eighty-eight minutes (plus generous head and tail credits).” The studio also rejected the original music score by Michael Kamen (The X-Men), commissioning Pitch Black composer Graeme Revell to produce a new soundtrack — sixty minutes of music — in the space of ten days. “The only way I could write so much music in ten days was to weight the approach in favour of electronics rather than orchestra,” Revell told Dreamwatch magazine. “But this was as much a creative decision as anything because the style of the film does not support a big bombastic orchestral score.” So rushed were the final stages of post-production, that several major effects shots appeared incomplete by the time the film hit theatres. Finally, says de Souza, “They released it and crossed their fingers.”

Despite problems which stretched from development to post-production and a widespread critical drubbing, the film — now entitled Lara Croft Tomb Raider — opened on 15 June 2001 with a colossal $47.7 million opening weekend, and went on to gross over $130 million in the US alone, and a total of $275 million worldwide. By the time the first weekend’s box office tallies were in, a sequel was already in the works, but although Angelina Jolie was asked to fulfill her contract for a sequel — with a $5 million pay increase — director Simon West was not invited back. “I guess at some point somebody said, ‘We’re not going to go through that shit again,’” suggests de Souza. “‘The director this time is not going to be someone who thinks he’s a writer.’”

Instead, producers Gordon and Levin hired cinematographer-turned-director Jan de Bont, whose directing career had derailed after early successes like Speed and Twister, with Speed 2: Cruise Control and The Haunting both proving to be box office disappointments. James V. Hart (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Hook) and hot newcomer Dean Georgaris (Paycheck, Mission: Impossible III) were among those hired to work on the script, which concerned a desperate search for Pandora’s Box, the mythical source of all the pain in the world. “The first one did not have a strong story, I’ll be the first to admit it,” producer Lloyd Levin later told Entertainment Weekly. “We should have made a better movie. But we learned from our mistakes and this new one is a better movie. For starters, it’s got a plot.”

Like West, de Souza did not expect to have anything to do with the Tomb Raider sequel, until he happened to see publicity stills featuring Angelina Jolie in the underwater temple of Alexander the Great. After doing some digging of his own, de Souza discovered that Lara was being partnered with a British agent — just as she had been in his drafts for the first Tomb Raider film. “That’s when I called the Writers Guild and said, ‘Listen, this may sound wacky, but when the Tomb Raider II script comes in for credit determination, could you check it against my “officially discarded” March 1999 script of Tomb Raider I?’” Sure enough, he says, “the Guild reader said, ‘Hold on a second — the source of this script is obviously the de Souza script, resurrected.’ At that point, the studio said, ‘That’s impossible! This script was a cold start, a totally brilliant fresh new approach of sheer geniusity that just happens to have been written by our producer.’” This was a shock, de Souza says, “because I’ve known Lloyd Levin for a dozen years, and he’s never written anything except a memo.”3

De Souza can only guess what happened. “After the movie opened, on the following Monday, they probably said, ‘We want to have a sequel out in two years,’ which is impossible. Then somebody went to the filing cabinet, found the script I wrote, which had been in pre-production with sets designed, and said, ‘No it’s not — we’ve got a schedule, boards, budgets, breakdowns and production design for the de Souza draft!’ So they resurrected my script, which gave them a head start. It shows how crazy it can get.” Nevertheless, he adds, “It actually showed some kind of efficiency for a change, that somebody had the sense to remember they already had a script they liked from before... returning to the script (and budget, board, location work, prop purchases, etc) all still lying around from only ten months earlier. So they already had the comp’d Scuba gear and underwater sleds, the design for Alexander the Great’s library set, Hogan’s alley, etc.” What was more surprising for de Souza was that he had to find out by accident. “You’d think Larry Gordon would have called me to tell me this,” he says. “I’d worked with him many times. But no — I had to find it out from the Internet.”

Although Levin and Hart have privately stated that de Souza had nothing to do with the script for the sequel (technically true), the WGA agreed to award de Souza a shared story credit with Hart, with Dean Georgaris receiving sole screenplay credit. “The sequel, with every line of dialogue changed, does essentially follow my script for about twenty minutes,” says de Souza. “Then when the MI6 men come to her house, she wasn’t a bitch on wheels for no discernable reason, but she was thrown by the presence of the younger government guy. [In my draft,] he was the male lead of the picture, and his moment where he betrayed Lara and Queen and Country was in the movie, mind-fucking the audience, instead of in the movie’s back-story. Also, they didn’t know what Alexander had hidden, but they knew the other heavies were killing their way towards it.” Says de Souza, “The Guild said... Tomb Raider II’s genesis from my 1999 script was ‘irrefutable’ — the actual word used in the Guild paperwork — at which point the studio was bound by the sixty-five year-old contract that says, ‘Guild determines credit, period.’ And that’s how I worked on Tomb Raider for six months, but got a screen credit for no months on Tomb Raider II!”

Lara Croft Tomb Raider — The Cradle of Life finally opened on 24 July 2003 with a disappointing first-weekend take of $21.8 million — less than half that of the original — and an overall worldwide gross of $156 million. Critics were slightly kinder than they had been the first time around, but it was obvious that the paying public weren’t impressed. Paramount was swift to try and place the blame for the film’s failure elsewhere. “The only thing that we can attribute it to is that gamers were not happy with the latest version of the videogame,” ventured the studio’s Wayne Lewellen, referring to the critically derided PlayStation 2 game Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, which had failed to repeat the success of earlier incarnations. Entertainment Weekly had a different opinion: “If Paramount had spent a few bucks on polling, it might have discovered that despite its $131 million gross, nobody who went to the first Tomb Raider walked out saying, ‘Can’t wait for part two!’”

The Tomb Raider property suffered mixed fortunes in the wake of the twin debacles of the Angel of Darkness console game and Cradle of Life movie. In 2006, Crystal Dynamics superseded Core Design as overseers of the game’s future development, inviting one of the original creators, Toby Gard, to work on a Tomb Raider reboot, which would take Lara Croft back to her tomb-raiding roots. The resulting game, Tomb Raider: Legend, was a bestselling title on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC, and a remake of the original game — Tomb Raider: Anniversary — was developed and released in 2007, followed by Tomb Raider: Underworld a year later, all proving moderately successful. On 18 August 2010, Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix released a download-only title, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, the first game not to feature the words ‘Tomb Raider’ in the title. That nomenclature was being held back for a ground-breaking reboot of the franchise, scheduled for late 2012.

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1 Now commonly known as the PlayStation One.

2 Fans may have been even more doubtful if they knew that Jolie wanted Lara to have a Mohawk hairstyle instead of Lara’s plaited pony-tail.

3 Even if Levin did contribute to the screenplay, as he claims, the WGA makes it even more difficult for producers to achieve writing credits than directors, for obvious reasons.