After Wonder Woman, Alicia Vikander’s Tomb Raider will be the next great action heroine flick

Wonder Woman set a really high bar for artistic blockbuster flicks with female action stars at the forefront. Can Alicia Vikander manage the same success with Tomb Raider?

In an age where women are fighting relentlessly for equal representation, equal pay and juicy leading roles, the only category suffering worse at the box office is video game adaptations. They just don’t land with mainstream movie audiences.

Take Assassin’s Creed, for example. There are nine main games, plus multiple spin-offs with comics and novels. It’s Ubisoft’s best game and sold more than 100 million copies, putting it on par with a little Italian plumber named Mario. But when it came to translating that success to cinema dollars, it became just another miss for Michael Fassbender. It only made $54.6 million domestically. That’s it. Warcraft? Even less. Only two video game adaptations have broken $100 million domestically; those are Angry Birds and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the first one with Angelina Jolie that came out in 2001.

So, forgive us for being super skeptical of what Alicia Vikander will do with Lara Croft when her new film hits theaters next March. Based on the 2013 video game reboot (which finally ditched the short shorts and crappy rendering), the Oscar-winning actress hopes to emulate a few traits that seem quite familiar.

While speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Vikander explained:

"“She has all the fierce, tough, curious, intelligent traits, but we’ve stripped away all of her experience. She hasn’t gone on an adventure just yet. She thought he was a stuck up businessperson living in the modern youth culture of suburban London, but then this whole box of information. This is the beginning.”"

Hmm. You know, that kind of sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In fact, it sounds a lot like Diana Prince’s journey in Wonder Woman, a film that “boasts the best hold of any superhero film in more than 15 years at the North American box office.”

The simplest thing to peg Wonder Woman‘s success on is the amount of heart the film carries. It just feels so honest and lovingly crafted. Also, it doesn’t hurt that Gal Gadot’s interpretation remained so faithful to the comics either.

And if we’re comparing Vikander’s looks to the game, she nailed it. Even the newest picture revealed looks like a frame ripped out of the game.

Check it out:

So they’ve got the aesthetic down, a great cast (give Walter Goggins and Daniel Wu more work!), DCEU veteran Junkie XL working on the score, and Vikander basically admitted to drawing inspiration from Indiana Jones and Wonder Woman … what else is there?

(Well, there’s the script and the fact that we don’t know much about Norwegian director Roar Uthaug. Though, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.)

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The world feels ready for more big budget action heroines. Atomic Blonde hits theaters soon, followed by The Last Jedi in December. (I don’t know, should I count Karen Gillan in Jumanji?) By the time Tomb Raider rolls around on March 16, 2018, the world may be starving for another heroine to root for.

So, here’s hoping Vikander can become as iconic as Lara Croft deserves to be.