For some folks calling Tron: Legacy anything but a ‘meh’ movie would be trying to say that it was worth the regard that people so badly wanted to give it. The movie was a financial success but still didn’t impress upon Disney the desire to make another one following it, though the whole story might have been hard to pull off yet again since Flynn did manage to destroy the world he helped to create and took care of Clu in the first place. The reason that Andrew Guadion of Screenrant and many others are willing to go on and on about how the movie did in fact become important has to do with the fact that it brought back the idea of re-invigorating a franchise that people hadn’t seen in a while, hence the return of Star Wars, Mary Poppins, and other movies that weren’t Disney but were continuations of an old theme. This idea to revisit an old timeline that had never been fully concluded became something that was interesting in a way but didn’t pan out successfully for a handful of movies for various reasons. With Tron it had more to do with the fact that the movie wasn’t all that big when it came out decades before and the legacy movie really didn’t do much else save to capitalize on the technology that was already in place and a few actors that people happened to enjoy due to their appearance in other movies.
One other thing that Tron contributed so heavily to was the idea of de-aging characters to make them look like their younger selves, thereby giving rise to another new type of technology that would be featured in other movies to come. The de-aging process isn’t exactly perfect and it still has a ways to go apparently since if anyone believed that Robert De Niro looked like he was in his 30s in The Irishman then they need to remember what he looked like in Taxi Driver, when he was 31. Younger actors aren’t always the answer since they don’t tend to come close enough in appearance for many fans, but the de-aging process still has a few bugs to work out as well. It’s been used in several movies to date, while the character of Clu was a big reason why more work was needed, it was a big step forward since the character was fine for what the movie was and how it needed to work. If you recall Pirates of Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Johnny Depp’s face was taken back several years as well and it looked a little awkward to say the least, but it was still accepted since it was a short enough period of time and it helped to explain the origin of the main antagonist.
It’s unlikely we’ll see a Tron 3, but the Legacy movie was just good enough that people might actually want to know what happened to Tron, who had been turned into Clu’s minion and top fighter. The only way we’ll probably get to know is online if someone deigns to answer such a question, but as far as the movie goes it did offer up a couple of contributions as far as cinema goes since Clu was kind of a hot mess in some takes but the technology worked just fine most of the time. Plus it was nice to have Jeff Bridges and his double in the same frame at the same time, as it was a pretty cool effect. One can easily say that Tron: Legacy was a success but maybe if it had tripled its budget Disney would have thought about bringing back another one. As it is the Mouse House didn’t think the effort was needed and has let Tron sit to this point, until maybe, just maybe they can dust it off and use it again. That appears to be the trick these days, waiting until someone is ready to start talking about the movie before it’s brought back and then hoping like hell that it’s going to be popular again so that the corporation can start wringing it for all it’s worth. That sounds a little cynical but it also sounds quite real since the name of the game is to see how much each movie can earn and therefore how much it’s really worth.
Tron doesn’t appear to be the type of movie that’s really going to win over a mass amount of people continually as it’s become a pretty open and shut movie from start to end. Brian Boone of Looper has more on this. There could be some interest in another movie later on, but it would likely need to have a different cast or bring back Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde at the very least. As far as Jeff Bridges is concerned, his part is pretty much done, unless someone’s ready to use a heavy dose of movie magic.
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