I am a huge fan of the Tron franchise. I’ve seen Tron and Tron: Legacy more times than I can count. I’ve played numerous Tron video games, and riding Tron: Lightcycle Run at Walt Disney World was a nearly religious experience for me. I was frustrated for years that no sequel to Tron: Legacy ever materialized. And I was honestly even more frustrated when a third Tron movie, Tron: Ares, was finally announced.
While I’m excited to see Tron: Ares, I’m still a little annoyed that the movie isn’t a direct sequel to Tron: Legacy. As far as we know, Jeff Bridges is the only actor from Legacy to return, and the new film takes the series in a new direction. It won’t deal much, if at all, with the events of Legacy, but it’s also not a complete reboot. CinemaBlend attended a set visit during the production of Ares, where (via Comicbook.com) producer Jeff Springer said…
We’re not telling that story right now…in deciding to move forward to a new story. But we’re not undoing that either, so it’s still out there. But this story is about, like, in terms of it, because, yeah, it’s just, it’s cleaner to tell. We’re basically starting in the same space where it’s a character coming to this world, and what will his experience be through this story?
Tron: Legacy ended with Quorra, played by Olivia Wilde, a character from The Grid, making the leap into the real world. Ares will use that concept as its starting point. Jared Leto’s Ares also enters the real world from the Grid. In the Tron: Ares trailer, we also see Lightcycles chopping through police cars.
The fact that the events of Tron: Legacy aren’t being undone at least keeps the door open a crack for a true sequel to Legacy, or at least a follow-up to Ares that ties in the events of the first two Tron films more directly. I would certainly love to see that, and Springer is clear that such a thing is at least theoretically possible. He continued…
And so it’s not meant to undo the end of Legacy. It’s just not continuing that story. It’s still in the world. It still happened. We’ll just say that….It still happened. And there’s nothing we’re doing to say that it didn’t. And there’s things in the DNA that keep it alive, even in our story.
As a huge Tron fan, I’m excited to see Ares when it opens next month. I hope it’s great in its own right and a big enough success that we don’t need to wait another decade or two for another sequel. I just hope that eventually one of those movies continues the story that Tron: Legacy left behind.
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