... Disney has elected not to move forward with “Tron 3,” which was gearing up to start production this fall in Canada under the direction of Joseph Kosinski.
Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde were slated to return to star and Kosinski had been courting Jared Leto and Olivia Munn to co-star in the big-budget sequel.
The cancellation of “Tron 3” comes on the heels of “Tomorrowland” underperforming at the box office last weekend. Brad Bird‘s original film cost Disney $180 million and grossed a disappointing $42.7 million over the four-day holiday weekend.
The original Tron had a lot of animation talent working on it. Bill Kroyer was heavily involved, Steve Lisberger conceived the original story and directed the live-action shoot, the Disney ink-and-paint department (along with the ink-and-paint crew at Cuckoo's Next Studio in Taiwan) completed a lot of the analog visual effects (no CG in the early eighties).
The studio, then led by former Disney publicity head Tom Wilhite, had high expectations for Tron, but it under-performed at the box office, overshadowed by Spielberg's E.T.. And that was pretty much it ... until Diz Co. dusted off the Tron concept and made itself a sequel, Tron: Legacy, released in 2010.
The second installment had a world-wide gross north of $400 million, but apparently that isn't enough to get the third movie off the ground. Ah well.
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No CG in the early '80s? Triple I, MAGI/Synthavision, Robert Abel & Associates, and Digital Effects would disagree with you(if those companies still existed today)as combined they provided roughly 20 minutes worth of computer generated imagery for the original Tron. The majority of effects were analogue, but not all.
It was the computer animation that John Lasseter saw during Tron's production, while he was working on Mickey's Christmas Carol, that got him really interested in pursuing computer animation himself.
http://tron.wikia.com/wiki/John_Lasseter
Yup. Had a brain fart. Certainly CG in the early eighties, just not a lot in use compared to later. I remember all the laborious cel work that was done because there was no easy/simple way to transer computer effects to the screen.
Even ten years on, Jurassic Park has less computer generated dinosaurs than most folks think. A lot of stuff was animatronics.
Problem was not the bells and whistles with the second, it was the lack of a good plot and heart.
Also missing from most films of these types these days.
Too much focus on the love of money.
Not to mention the TL had too much of a God complex. Most interesting part was at the beginning, when our hero boy first enters the Tron matrix world. The rest was a real mind numbing bore fest.
Until the Disney co works these things out and sees the light, they need to keep their mousy claws out of such adventure stories cause they're going to fail each time.
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