Amazon's highly-anticipated live-action Tomb Raider TV show is reportedly "dead."
As spotted by Eurogamer, the Daily Mail today reports that the show has "hit the buffers," with Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner — who was tipped to play the titular character — tied up with other projects for most of 2025.
The Mail said the project — which would have been based on the long-running Tomb Raider video game franchise — may have been impacted when head of Amazon Studios Jennifer Salke, who greenlit the show, was "booted" from her position last week.
However, Puck reports Salke provided "a brutal update" before she left Amazon, intimating Waller-Bridge had allegedly not produced a script despite the $20 million-a-year deal she signed in 2019. Nonetheless, the deal was renewed, with Puck reporting that Salke was "personally overseeing after announcing a series pickup last May," and the series "has now gone through two writers rooms and tens of millions of dollars in development costs. There’s still no script."
Amazon formally announced its Tomb Raider live-action series for Prime Video in January 2023, revealing Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge was in place as writer and executive producer. At the time, it was thought Amazon also had plans to make a new Tomb Raider movie and at least one additional video game, hoping to make an MCU-like interconnected universe.
Though best-known for Fleabag, Waller-Bridge is no stranger to the action-adventure genre after scripting the James Bond film No Time to Die and starring in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
It all went quiet, however, until reports that Waller-Bridge hoped to create something "dangerous and exciting" bubbled up last May as she opened up about her love of Lara growing up. "My parents were very smart because they didn't actually limit me," she recalled. "They could sense that I was going to just game myself into the ground, and I did. I packed the PlayStation away, and I was like, 'I've got to not do that because I've got to write and read and do other stuff.' "
Amazon and Waller-Bridge have declined to comment on the rumors.
Vikki Blake is a reporter, critic, columnist, and consultant. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
