Will There Be A 'Tron 3'?

Tron Legacy hit DVD and Blu-ray this week, and Disney had a few members of the cast and crew out at WonderCon last weekend to encourage people to take a dip in this leg of the Tron revenue stream. Through all the interviews that resulted, there is the looming question of another Tron sequel. No one answered the question definitively, though there were a lot of statements that started with "Well, if we make another one..."

Now Deadline reports that Disney has definitely started work on another Tron film, but that's all anyone seems willing to say at the moment.

The Deadline piece is a strange thing that congratulates director Joseph Kosinski on being the new highest-grossing first-time filmmaker before bending backward to qualify that success, and mostly ignoring the 3D inflation that led to Tron Legacy's $400m worldwide take.

It does say, however, that amid continued development on a Black Hole re-imagining and Oblivion (which is no longer at Disney) Jospeh Kosinski is starting to work out the story for a Tron sequel with writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz. (The same guys who got credit for Tron Legacy's threadbare script, and were pre-emptively hired to write a sequel last year.) The studio has already laid vague plans for a sequel with story threads in Legacy and small pieces of footage on the new DVD.

The key to the question about another Tron film may be in a comment Joseph Kosinskiu made to Empire while explaining that the upcoming animated series Tron: Uprising will fill in some backstory gaps:

Legacy played really well to people in their twenties and thirties, but it actually didn't bring in kids. So we hope Uprising will bring a new generation of fans in the same way that Clone Wars has brought a new generation to Star Wars.

In other words, Disney was counting on Tron Legacy to be a mad merchandising hit — see all the toys and other licensed stuff that was produced — and those dollars may not have materialized yet. The home video release could help, as families that didn't want to fork out for high 3D ticket prices might see the movie now, leading to kids wanting Tron stuff. If the younger generation can be brought on board, then you can bet a third film will happen quickly.