Image via Paramount Pictures
Published Oct 22, 2026, 12:55 AM EDT
Collier Jennings is an entertainment journalist with extensive experience. Collier, or "CJ" to his friends and family, is a dedicated fan of genre films - particularly science fiction, fantasy, and comic book adaptations, not to mention all forms of animation. This stems from a close bond with his father, who introduced him to these genres via copies of X-Men comics and reruns of the original Ultraman series. With his near-encyclopedic knowledge and bottomless love of genre, he's tackled a wide variety of articles.
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Last week, another video game reboot madea splash, with Street Fighter taking the number one spot at the box office. It's a surprising outcome, given that Street Fighter received mostly mixed reviews. Most critics, including Collider's Aidan Kelley, noted that while Street Fighter captures the over-the-top fights and signature moves that make the original video games so iconic, it stumbles with certain casting choices and the story. But while Street Fighter may have punched its way to a box-office victory, another video game adaptation is currently capturing audience attention on Netflix.
The movie is Tomb Raider,released in 2018. While the first Tomb Raider movie featured Angelina Jolie as the legendary treasure hunter Lara Croft, this new version cast Alicia Vikander in the role. It also draws more inspiration from the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, with Lara setting out on a journey to find her missing father (Dominic West) and running afoul of Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins). As of this writing, Tomb Raider has cracked Netflix's Top 10 movies list, according to FlixPatrol. It's no surprise, as this is one of the more underrated video game movies out there.
‘Tomb Raider’ Serves as a Solid Origin Story for Lara Croft
MGMThe fun of watching Tomb Raider is seeing how Lara Croft grows into the daring treasure hunter fans know and love. When she's first introduced in the movie, Lara throws herself into danger: a high-octane bike chase leads to her arrest, and she enters kickboxing matches where she takes down opponents twice her size. That experience lends itself well to some incredible action sequences, which director Roar Uthaug stages with expert precision. Lara leaps from the wreckage of a ship as it plummets down a waterfall and takes down heavily armored opponents with arrows.
It also doesn't hurt that Alicia Vikander turns in a great performance as Lara. She holds her own against Goggins, who threatens to steal the show, and has a great rapport with Daniel Wu, who portrays the sailor who takes her to the island where her father is held hostage. She also shows plenty of emotion beyond being an action heroine, particularly in a scene where Lara is emotionally shaken after having to kill one of Vogel's men. Vikander's gift for emotional depth served her well in her breakout role in Ex Machina, and it serves her particularly well in Tomb Raider.
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
🎄Die Hard
FIND YOUR FRANCHISE →
01
How does a room know you've walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
ASomeone recognises me, and the temperature in the room drops without a single word being said. BLoudly and warmly. I arrive with my people, and we're already laughing about something. CI'm the one who told everybody where to stand. I walked this room twice before anyone else arrived. DBy accident. I wasn't supposed to be here, and now I'm the only one who can do anything about it.
NEXT QUESTION →
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
AEconomical and devastating. Trained technique, no wasted motion, finished before most people notice it started. BLoud, heavy and weirdly joyful. I'm not elegant, I hit like a truck, and I always have backup. CTo plan, until the plan breaks. Then I improvise at full sprint and refuse to stop moving. DBadly, honestly, and with a lot of swearing. I take more damage than I deal and I still don't go down.
NEXT QUESTION →
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
ANobody. I have contacts, favours and people who owe me, but when it begins I work alone. BEveryone. My people are the entire point, and I'd trade the whole mission for any one of them. CA small hand-picked team I trust completely, and I'd still take the worst part of the job myself. DA voice on the other end of a radio and a building full of people who don't know I exist.
NEXT QUESTION →
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you're actually made of.
AFocus, commitment and sheer will. Grief is fuel if you point it in the right direction. BThe people counting on me. I don't appear to have a limit when it's family on the line. CRefusing to accept the odds. Somebody has to do the impossible part, and it's going to be me. DSpite, mostly. And a growing sense that these people picked the wrong building.
NEXT QUESTION →
05
There's a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
AA black muscle car I am unreasonably attached to, and I will dismantle an entire empire over it. BSomething impossibly modified, at impossible speed, off an impossible ramp. Physics is a suggestion. CA motorbike at full throttle through a city I memorised last night. And then off a cliff. DA borrowed car, badly, while somebody in the passenger seat politely asks me to slow down.
NEXT QUESTION →
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
AThere are rules and I respect them absolutely, right up until somebody breaks one against me. BI don't take orders. I take care of people, and everything else tends to sort itself out. CI serve the mission, not the memo. If my people are in danger, the orders come second. DThey're in a van outside telling me what I'm doing wrong while I'm the one bleeding on broken glass.
NEXT QUESTION →
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
ASomething was taken from me that can't be replaced, and I've been settling that account ever since. BBelonging. I built a family out of people who had nowhere else, and I'll defend it with everything. CThe conviction that if I stop, people die. I don't know how to hand that to anyone else. DI just wanted to get through the holidays with my family. Everything after that was self-defence.
NEXT QUESTION →
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
AThat I was a myth people warned each other about in whispers, and that they were right to. BThat I never left anyone behind, the door was always open, and there was always a place at the table. CThat I did the impossible part myself, every single time, and never asked anyone to risk it for me. DThat I was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, who turned out to be very hard to kill.
REVEAL MY FRANCHISE →
Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don't posture, you don't escalate, and you don't warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start.
- The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one against him.
- You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and then completely immovable past it.
- Focus, commitment and sheer will. You'd be the one carrying grief through three sequels and turning it into technique rather than noise.
- People wouldn't call you dangerous. They'd say your name quietly and let that do the work.
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you'd drive through a building for any one of them.
- This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject, because loyalty scales and plot doesn't have to.
- You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you defend it past the point of reason.
- You'd thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve, an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
- The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it's really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
- This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that's left.
- You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an administrative error.
- You'd thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure. The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
- Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
- Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned, bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
- You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn't make you noble, it makes you sarcastic, and then it makes you unstoppable.
- You'd thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation, and you've never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
- You didn't want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ
A 'Tomb Raider' Sequel Never Came To Pass
Tomb Raider was a modest box-office hit, leading to plans for a sequel. Ben Wheatley (Free Fire) and later Misha Green (Lovecraft Country) were tapped to direct, with Alicia Vikander returning as Lara Croft. But the sequel never came to pass because the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted production and MGM lost the rights to the Tomb Raider franchise in 2022. Vikander eventually stepped away from the role of Lara, leading to yet another reboot. This time, Prime Video will launch a new Tomb Raider series, with Sophie Turner picking up Lara's twin pistols.
Ironically, Netflix delivered its own take on Lara Croft with the animated series Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft. Like the Tomb Raider movie, it draws on the 2013 games and takes place directly after the events of Shadow of the Tomb Raider. This time, Hayley Atwell (Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning) voices Lara, who is struggling to deal with the death of her mentor Roth (Nolan North). Showrunner Tasha Huo said part of the draw of The Legend of Lara Croft is how Lara uses her globe-trotting exploits to cope with her feelings, a similar themeexplored in 2018's Tomb Raider.
"I’m a big proponent of therapy and self-analysis as a way to just grow as a human being. It’s fantastic. And I’m glad Lara can do it. She hates therapy! So using adventure as therapy is a really great way for Lara to learn how to be better."
Whether you're looking for a new video game movie to watch after Street Fighter or were disappointed by it, Tomb Raider is the perfect remedy. Hopefully, Prime Video's version will tap into the same energy that fueled this movie.
Release Date March 16, 2018
Runtime 118 minutes
Director Roar Uthaug
