Tomb Raider · Feature Film · 2001 · Paramount Pictures
Reviewed at 19% and grossed $274 million. The first genuinely successful video game film, and it worked because of one casting decision.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider arrived in 2001 with Angelina Jolie in the title role, on a budget of $115 million, and made over $274 million worldwide. It opened at number one with $48.2 million — beating both the opening record for a film with a female protagonist, previously held by Charlie's Angels at $40.1 million, and the opening record for a video game adaptation, previously Pokémon: The First Movie at $31 million. Critically it was dismissed, holding a 19% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But almost every review that panned the film exempted Jolie, and that is the whole story of its success. By 2001 Lara Croft was among the most recognisable fictional characters alive — a magazine cover fixture, an advertising presence, a cultural figure far beyond the games — and casting an actor who could physically and charismatically embody her was the only genuinely difficult problem the production had to solve. It solved it, and the audience turned up for the character rather than for the film. In commercial terms this made it the first real proof that a video game adaptation could function as a mainstream blockbuster, after a decade in which the category was a byword for embarrassment. It also cemented Jolie as a global action star.
The film that proved game adaptations could make money, on the strength of one casting choice
Video game films of the 1990s failed for a consistent reason: they tried to adapt the plot. Super Mario Bros. attempted to construct a story around characters who did not have one; Street Fighter tried to give a tournament roster a geopolitical narrative. Tomb Raider had an advantage none of them did — a protagonist who was already a fully formed public figure, with a look, a voice, an attitude and a level of recognition that existed independently of any particular game.
The production understood that this meant the job was casting, not writing. Jolie was, by 2001, one of very few actors who could plausibly walk on screen and simply be Lara Croft rather than perform her, and the film is constructed almost entirely around letting her do that. The plot is disposable. The reviews said so. It made $274 million anyway, because the audience had come to see a person, and the person was there.
The significance of Tomb Raider is structural rather than artistic. Before it, "video game movie" was an industry punchline and, more practically, a category studios approached with justified caution: the films did not make money. Tomb Raider's $274 million against a $115 million budget was the first unambiguous demonstration that the audience existed and would pay.
The lesson Hollywood drew was, characteristically, the wrong one — that game properties were bankable in general, which produced a long procession of adaptations that were neither well cast nor well made. But the underlying insight was sound, and it took another two decades for the industry to arrive at the same conclusion by a different route: adapt the character, not the plot, and cast someone the audience already wants to watch.