Hayley Atwell to play Lara Croft in new Tomb Raider cartoon on Netflix

Fresh off of an excellent (vocal) appearance in the first episode of Disney+’s What If…? series, a role that served as a pay-off to a decade of appearances in Marvel movies where her character rarely got to do anything after the first Captain America movie, Hayley Atwell has landed another high-profile voice acting gig. As announced today in a press release from Netflix, Atwell is going to star in a new Tomb Raider animated series from Legendary Television and dj2 Entertainment, with the latter being a production company that is dramatically ramping up its work in video game adaptations. It produced the Sonic The Hedgehog movie, and it also has a hand in upcoming adaptations of Life Is Strange, Sleeping Dogs, and Disco Elysium.

For those steeped in the Tomb Raider lore, especially the modern reboot trilogy where Lara Croft repeatedly gets trapped in hostile environments and has to figure out how to Metroid/Uncharted her way out of things, this series seems like a particularly intriguing concept. It’s going to be set after all of the new games, charting her “latest, greatest adventure,” which seems to imply that the events of those games—in which Lara gets trapped on an island with a weather-controlling ghost queen, gets stuck in an old Soviet military facility on a mountaintop, and nearly triggers an actual Mayan apocalypse—will be canon to this universe. The final game, 2018's Shadow Of The Tomb Raider (which was disappointing overall but had one real dynamite level), repositioned Lara as a defender of ancient mystical artifacts rather than someone who raids tombs for them, so that seems like a solid setup to generate new globe-trotting adventures for her to go on.

It’s also worth noting that this will be the second attempt to adapt the new Tomb Raider video games, with the first being director Roar Uthaug’s forgettable take from 2018. That one was based on the first installment of the trilogy.