The Best Live-Action Lara Croft Happened 2 Years Before Angelina Jolie's Tomb Raider Movie

Published Aug 29, 2026, 6:00 PM EDT Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020. Although there have been many screen adaptations of the Lara Croft video games, ironically, the best screen incarnation of the character is the protagonist of a technically unrelated series. Sometimes, a knock-off can capture the tone of a beloved piece of media better than its official screen adaptation. While Galaxy Quest might technically be an affectionate parody of the Star Trek franchise and its obsessive fans, it would be hard to find a viewer who doesn’t agree that the movie feels more like a love letter to Star Trek than many of the franchise’s official releases. Similarly, although the British murder mystery franchise Death in Paradise and Hollywood’s Knives Out movies aren’t adapted from any actual novels by the late great mystery writer Agatha Christie, they both feel much closer in tone to her books than edgy, self-serious official Christie adaptations like 2018’s The ABC Murders. Perhaps one of the strangest cases of this phenomenon came when a Canadian TV show managed to offer a more faithful adaptation of the Lara Croft games than either of the franchise's big-budget movies. Beginning in 1999 and running for three seasons until 2002, racking up 66 episodes in the process, Relic Hunter felt similar to the cult classic Highlander: The Series or any of the many other iconic ‘90s shows that blended a procedural format with supernatural and fantasy elements. The show focused on Tia Carrere’s Sydney Fox, a martial arts expert who doubled as a Professor of Ancient Studies, and, inevitably, combined these unlikely skill sets to travel the world as the titular relic hunter. Tia Carrere Is Basically Lara Croft In Relic Hunter Aided by her nebbish Brit sidekick Nigel, Sydney roamed from country to country trying to return stolen artifacts to their rightful owners, or the museums that stole them, depending on the episode. From Elvis Presley’s prized guitar to Zeus’s sundial, the show’s definition of relics was loose enough to accommodate a lot of wild adventures that sent Carrere’s Fox all over the world. Eagle-eyed readers may, by now, have noticed a similarity between Fox and a certain famous video game character who was popular around the same time. Indeed, while the live-action movie adaptation Lara Croft: Tomb Raider didn’t arrive on the big screen until 2001, the Lara Croft franchise began with 1996’s original game of the same name in 1996, followed by three sequels in the three years that followed. Carrere Is A Better Lara Croft Than Angelina Jolie & Alicia Vikander Credit: MovieStillsDB This meant that, by the time Fox first appeared on TV in Relic Hunter’s pilot, Lara Croft was already famous worldwide. There is no denying the reality that, while the show also functioned as a gender-flipped reimagining of the Indiana Jones movies, Relic Hunter was most definitely influenced and possibly even shaped by the popularity of the Lara Croft games. The thing is, it is equally hard to deny that Carrere’s Fox is the best screen incarnation of Lara so far, some 30 years after the first game was released. While Hayley Atwell’s animated take on the character for Netflix’s The Legend of Lara Croft offered a new spin on her persona, Carrere is the first actor to embody Lara as she is in the games. This, ironically, comes down to each screen incarnation wanting to offer something unique. When Angelina Jolie was cast as Croft, the filmmakers immediately built a larger-than-life, impossibly glamorous version of Lara around the actor’s well-established imperious screen persona. This Lara was unstoppable, but also unrelatable as a result. Vikander’s take on the character took her to another extreme, showing viewers a vulnerable, younger Lara, while Atwell’s traumatized take on Croft took the inherently silly franchise a little too seriously. In contrast, Carrere’s charming, tough, competent but flawed Relic Hunter heroine feels more human, and more like Lara, than any of the official Lara Croft adaptations. Release Date 1999 - 2002-00-00 Cast Christien Anholt Nigel Bailey