Breaking through with genre projects like “Kill List,” “High Rise” and “Free Fall,” filmmaker Ben Wheatley isn’t afraid of tackling something more mainstream.
He helmed Peter Capaldi’s first two “Doctor Who” episodes, and is currently in cinemas with “Meg 2: The Trench”. Whilst out promoting that film, he touched upon another blockbuster project he was linked to at one time – “Tomb Raider”.
More specifically, Wheatley was set to direct a sequel to the Alicia Vikander-led 2018 reboot of the property that was in the works back in 2019 and was targeting a shoot in 2020 in the UK.
However, the pandemic stalled those plans with Wheatley then exiting the project and “Lovecraft Country” creator Misha Green taking over – at least until the MGM and Amazon buyout ended that incarnation.
There are still plenty of questions about how Wheatley would’ve approached the material. Whilst he doesn’t go into it, he did tell Slashfilm recently that the project really did come that close to filming and explained how he’s able to jump between major studio films and indie pictures so easily:
“I wanted to make something big and poppy and fun and multiplex-y for a big audience. And [wife and creative partner Amy Jump] and I had been attached to ‘Tomb Raider’ and that was a part of that effort, but COVID saw to that, so we were like, ‘Oh God, we’d really got quite close to making that film.’
I think generally, as a film fan, I looked at the landscape of cinema, and making a studio picture is part of that ecosystem, isn’t it? It’s like that. I love studio films, always have done. I love indie films and everything in between as well.
So I’d made a conscious decision in the same way that I went and made ‘Doctor Who.’ I wanted to do it, I was a fan, so I kind of sought it out. And I think that the way I’ve made stuff over the years, which is going bouncing backwards and forwards, so it’s like ‘Happy New Year, Colin Burstead’ and then ‘Rebecca’ and then ‘In the Earth.’ It’s like having a connection to the low-budget stuff and then going and doing high-budget stuff is all quite organic.”
“Tomb Raider” now sits in the hands of Phoebe Waller-Bridge who is developing the property as a TV series for Amazon’s Prime Video.
