Tomb Raider Netflix show will help Lara deal with her grief so she can finally “start working on other sh*t”

The Tomb Raider animated series will be making its debut on Netflix later this year. The show is set to follow on from the events of the rebooted Survivor trilogy, which those who have played the games will know saw Lara Croft lose more than one friend (in fact, Rhianna Pratchett admitted to me the first game in the series became a “cavalcade of death”).

Now, speaking with Nerdistthe Tomb Raider series’ showrunner Tasha Huo told Lara will deal with the resulting grief in the first season of The Legend of Lara Croft, so she can finally “start working on other shit.”

“This series… really acts as a bridge between the origin story to the Lara that we fell in love with in the ’90s, when we first started picking up the games,” Huo told the publication. “That Lara was very quippy, very confident.”

The showrunner therefore wanted to explore how Lara became that more self-assured version of the series’ leading lady, and a TV show was a great medium to do just that. “I think what we got in the Survivor game series was so much humanity from her that she was very moving to me as a player, and surprising given the colder Lara that we met in the original series,” Huo said. “So for me, it was really cool to be able to explore the more vulnerable aspects of her while still maintaining the strong superhero figure that she is.”

Huo furthered: “Lara has been burdened with grief since the ’90s, but I feel like she’s never fully gotten over it. And I wanted to move past it, to be honest, so that she could start working on other things, but it felt like we still had to address it.”

“So in this first season, she is dealing with grief and we watch her power through to figure out how to become her best self after that so Lara can start working on other shit.”

Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft will make its Netflix debut on 10th October. In addition to Netflix’s series, Amazon also has a Tomb Raider TV project in the works with Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge attached.

The company is also working alongside developer Crystal Dynamics on an upcoming Tomb Raider game. Details are still thin on the ground for this particular project, but we do know it is being made in Unreal Engine 5.