So Will There Be Another TRON Movie Or Not?

Months ago Harry Knowles assured us that a sequel to Tron: Legacy would be greenlit any minute now. That green light never came, but now the DVD and Blu-Ray is hitting stores. With those units comes an ability for Disney to sense if the public wants a sequel to the film, or if this is another Planet of the Apes remake - money was made and everybody just walks away happy.

I don’t think anybody will make any real decisions for a little while, but I do think that Disney is leaning towards going again right now. There’s an article at Deadline (that reads like it the pen that wrote it was held by the very glove of Mickey Mouse, it’s so obviously coming from inside Disney) that crows about Joseph Kosinski having the biggest money-making debut of all time - a claim the subsequent article caveats into oblivion. The article also plays both sides of the fence a little bit; while it says that  Tron is an unabashed success for Disney (despite the numbers the article itself quotes barely bearing that out), it also cedes that sometimes studios shouldn’t try for franchises with some films that did well but don’t seem to have caught on.

My suspicion is that Disney has pinned enough on Tron - theme park rides, cartoons, games - that they’ll move forward on a sequel with a vastly lowered budget. They’re hoping for a Batman Begins to Dark Knight type of growth (as is de rigeur, Kosinski has said his sequel would be like The Dark Knight. Does that mean ‘not totally awful?’), but I’m curious if that can happen. There doesn’t seem to be a huge well of enthusiasm for Tron: Legacy, even among the defenders. You see very few people defending it in a big way, mostly just saying it was fun or looked good.

A terrible, terrible movie that barely performed (and mostly performed thanks to huge 3D bumps - large amounts of Tron’s box office is 3D) is possibly getting a sequel, with the same bad writers and bad director behind it. Hooray for Hollywood.