How come Star Wars gets a fuck ton of shitty sequels but the first TRON film in 15 years is a flop? I was waiting for this film since I was a child.
How come Star Wars gets a fuck ton of shitty sequels but the first TRON film in 15 years is a flop? I was waiting for this film since I was a child.
It’s a franchise built on boomer/Gen X understandings of video games and technology. We are in 2025 now, young people don’t give a shit about this stuff, yet they still try to pitch these films to a younger audience. The actual base concept of being trapped inside a video game has been incredibly popular with younger audiences in the last decade or so - look at all the stuff that has come out of Japan. The difference is that those films and TV series used modern video games as their inspiration, so younger audiences intuitively understand and connect with their worlds. TRON as a franchise is like some 50-year-old dad forcing his teenager to play some shitty 2D video game whilst rambling about how much fun he had with it back in the day. Your audience doesn’t care and it’s embarrassing that you haven’t worked this out yet.
This was the big thing for the sequel for me - it kind of just treated it as a fantasy world. An actually interesting film would have been written with the question of how computers have changed in mind. What would the concept of Tron look like in the modern age?
Ralph Breaks The Internet is actually s better sequel…
Honestly a lot of the problem is that TRON is one of those pregenitor medi that hasn’t adapted over the decades. It has a really solid design that could’ve been updated and adapted with the gaming media as a whole every ten years or so. But unlike say Dune, Mad Max, or westerns/samurai films it didn’t have a timelessness to hold it over. If it had taken a multimedia approach like say star wars it could’ve held up a lot better. But it’s calcified and the people at Disney are too inept to do something truly interesting with it.
Imagine a TRON series that follows different genres and settings that have been popular over the years. The RPG boom of the late 90s, the RTS craze of the early to mid aughts, or the shooter take over of the late aughts early teens. But alas that’s more likely to come out of fucking SAO than TRON at this point.
Yeah, they seem to be stuck between the nostalgia bait of the original and special-effects driven attempts to capture younger, modern audiences. The Super Mario Bros. Movie was a good example of how you can update the look and feel of a multi-generational product whilst retaining enough nods to older fans for them to feel included.
It does help that Nintendo out of everyone knows just how bad adapting media can get, just look at the OG live action Mario Bros movie. That’s not even the worst adaptation out there of the characters it’s actually a fun if a bit deranged movie especially when accounting for the CDI games.
The only true Mario in my book is Captain Lou Albano.
How old do you think I am?