It seems like Prime Video’s long-awaited Tomb Raider series is no longer moving forward.
Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge was announced to write the new series in January 2023, but later that year, the show had struggled to find a showrunner, and unfortunately, that was just the beginning.
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According to Daly Mail, Waller-Bridge has long been working on the scripts and were deemed “not ready to shoot.” Sources claim the series is more or less “dead,” or at the very least, it won’t be filming “in early 2025,” despite a Prime Video executive saying otherwise last year. It didn’t help when Jennifer Salke, who had a hand in ordering the show and personally overseeing it, departed from her role as Amazon Studios head last week.
Per a recent report from Puck, “Still, my favorite Salke move was giving Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the breakout creator of Fleabag, a $20 million-a-year overall deal in 2019. Sure, the TV business is littered with failed overalls, but when Waller-Bridge generated nothing in three years, Salke renewed the deal. Now, three years after that renewal, she still has nothing to show for it. 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.”
Since it hasn’t been officially announced that the series has been scrapped, it’s possible it could still happen. But the fact that it’s been two years and a script still hasn’t been fully produced and approved, it’s definitely trouble. What exactly happened with the script is unknown, but it’s likely to do with either Waller-Bridge being too busy or not having the right ideas for the script. Working on something like Tomb Raider that has been so loved by fans and has been adapted numerous times can be hard.
If Tomb Raider has been scrapped, it’s likely it won’t be the last adaptation. Plus, fans recently got a Tomb Raider series on Netflix with Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft, starring Hayley Atwell. Another season of the animated series is coming, so fans can still look forward to that in the future. Plus, it’s always possible that the Prime Video Tomb Raider series will still happen, but it’s looking less and less likely.