The film stars Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft, who embarks on a perilous journey to her father's last-known destination, hoping to solve the mystery of his disappearance.

[9] Another reboot film, set to be part of a shared universe that will include a television series and a video game, is in development at Amazon Studios.

Lara reluctantly accepts and gains access to a secret chamber in her father's tomb, where she finds a pre-recorded video message from Richard detailing his research into Himiko, the mythical Queen of Yamatai who was said to command the power over life and death.

With the money, Lara travels to Hong Kong where she hires Lu Ren, captain of the ship Endurance, to sail into the Devil's Sea and the island of Yamatai.

After surviving rapids and narrowly avoiding falling over a waterfall with the wreck of a wartime airplane, Lara reunites with her father, who is revealed to be alive and stays on the island to prevent Trinity from finding Himiko's tomb.

Lara returns to London, where she formally accepts her inheritance and inadvertently discovers that Trinity's front company, Patna, is a subsidiary of Croft Holdings.

[10] Initially, Megan Fox,[11] Jennifer Lawrence, Olivia Wilde and Mila Kunis were originally rumored to portray Lara Croft, but all had declined.

[19][20][21] Principal photography began on January 23, 2017, in Cape Town, South Africa, and wrapped on June 9, 2017, at Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden in Hertfordshire, England.

[34] In the United States and Canada, Tomb Raider was released alongside Love, Simon and I Can Only Imagine, and was projected to gross $23–29 million from 3,854 theaters in its opening weekend.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Tomb Raider reboots the franchise with a more grounded approach and a star who's more than up to the task—neither of which are well served by an uninspired origin story.

[6] Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two out of four stars and said, "The Lara Croft reboot Tomb Raider isn’t half bad for an hour.

The film strains credulity even for a vid-game fantasy by letting the leading lady recover quickly from bad injuries, but other than that, Vikander commands attention and is the element here that makes Tomb Raider sort of watchable.

The movie is full of vine-swinging, bow-and-arrow-shooting, ancient-spirit-meeting action, but most of it is staged on a convincing human scale, one that’s been expertly tailored to its star’s understated directness.

"[48] Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com gave the film three out of four stars and said, "this is a beautifully crafted and unpretentious piece of action cinema, with several sequences that are as gorgeous as they are thrilling, and a female hero who's as elegant as she is deadly: an ass-kicking Audrey Hepburn.

"[49] IndieWire's Anne Thompson wrote that Tomb Raider "was a well-mounted, intelligently wrought adventure, more grounded in the real world than its fantasy predecessors" and that "it establishes the action bonafides of both Vikander and director Roar Uthaug.

[54] In September 2019, Ben Wheatley, Jump's husband, signed on to direct the sequel, with a planned March 19, 2021 release date, with Warner Bros. Pictures dropping out of the project.

[56] According to Geek Vibes Nation, principal photography was scheduled to start in April with filming taking place across several countries including England, South Africa, Finland, and China, and looking to deliver a faithful adaptation of the games' story.

[59] In January 2021, Misha Green signed to replace Jump and Wheatley respectively as writer and director, with the latter moving on to direct Meg 2: The Trench for Warner Bros. Pictures instead.

[60] In May 2021, Misha Green confirmed via her official Twitter account that the first draft of the script, with the working title Tomb Raider: Obsidian, had been completed.

[63][64] In September that year, Green responded to a fan question about the status of the film on her Twitter account, indicating that she was still set to direct her own script.

[65] In July 2022, it was reported that MGM had lost the film rights to the Tomb Raider franchise, after the window in which to give the sequel the green light ran out, culminating in Vikander's departure from the lead role.

During this time, the rights reverted to its original game companies (Eidos and Crystal Dynamics), which were later acquired by Embracer Group in the third quarter of 2022,[66][67] prompting a bidding war among other film studios.

The film is intended to be interconnected with a television series being developed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and a video game from Crystal Dynamics, forming a Tomb Raider shared universe.