Alicia Vikander, who won an Academy Award for her performance in The Danish Girl, will star in a Tomb Raider reboot as Lara Croft, a role that was first played on screen by another Academy Award winner, Angelina Jolie, who won the Oscar for “Best Supporting Actress” in 1999 for Girl, Interrupted, two years before she starred in the first of two Tomb Raider films in 2001.

The rebooting of the Tomb Raider franchise was announced last November (see “Geek Movie News Round-Up”).  Roar Uthaug, who directed the 2015 Norwegian disaster film The Wave has signed on to direct the new Tomb Raider movie.

Vikander, who was brilliant as the robot Ava in Alex Garland’s 2015 science fiction thriller Ex Machina, will, according to the Hollywood Reporter, play a young Lara Croft who is experiencing her first adventure, an origin story as it were for arguably the most popular female video game heroine of all time thanks to the success of the 1990s Tomb Raider game from Eidos Interactive that sold 7.5 million copies, and the popularity of the two Tomb Raider films that helped make Jolie an international star, as well as comic book series from Top Cow (1999-2005) and Dark Horse (2014--Ongoing).