Get ready to go back to the grid programs. There’s life in the old TRON franchise yet.
For fans of TRON and TRON Legacy, there was some good news coming out of press events for Disney’s Dumbo this week. /Film‘s Peter Sciretta spoke with TRON Legacy co-producer Justin Springer about the likelihood of seeing a TRON 3 on the big screen.
“Look, I will never stop being interested in making a TRON movie. I love the opportunity to do it. It’s a title that never really goes away internally,” said Justin Springer. “There’s always people around the company who like it a whole lot. And so, we’ll see what happens. It would be great to get the opportunity to do it again. It’s interesting – what I will say is that I think it continues to be relevant both in its ideas and also just the visual iconography of it. I think people are still are interested in it and it still feels contemporary to me. So it’s just about finding the right time, right script, and the right people at the studio saying ‘yes.’ You know, just the usual.”
According to Ehren Kruger, who was a writer for Dumbo and involved in the conversation, “all you need is for fans to demand it, just like last time.” A sentiment Springer agreed with.
Disney will have a lot on its plate once the acquisition of 21st Century Fox goes through next week. But just like what happened to greenlight TRON Legacy, if enough fans show their support for a sequel, it could get priority among all the other movies.
So fans, start wearing your TRON Cosplay to conventions, buy that light up TRON Legacy artwork, stand in long lines to ride the new TRON roller coaster when it opens at the Magic Kingdom in 2021.
It’s been almost 10 years since TRON Legacy appeared in theaters and re-ignited a passion for all things TRON around the world. That film itself came 28 years after the original TRON. We can hope that soon there will be enough renewed interest to start work on a 3rd TRON film and we won’t have to wait another 18 years to see it.
The way technology has progressed, you could use Lightstorm’s Avatar motion-capture technology, and the digital de-aging technology used on Samuel L. Jackson in Captain Marvel and bring back nearly any character to how they looked in the 1980s.
If we have to wait 18 more years, who knows what technology might look like. As they said in the /film article, we could all have lightcycles of our own and live in the grid.
If TRON 3 was approved by Disney, what do you hope the story would be about?