Director Joseph Kosinski He is in the news thanks to the overwhelming success of ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, but for years he was mainly known for having directed ‘TRON: Legacy’. In fact, the initial plan is for him to handle ‘TRON 3’ as well, but the project was finally shelved and the filmmaker has now revealed the reasons.
Blame Marvel and Star Wars?
Kosinski had apparently advanced the work so far on ‘TRON: Ascension’ that he already had both the script and the necessary storyboards to get down to work seriously. Unfortunately, Disney changed his mind at the last minute and the director has explained why in an interview with Vulture:
I was very close. I really tried. I was close in 2015, and Disney canceled it. I hadn’t built anything, but I had the entire storyboard for the movie and had written it. He was very excited because he inverted the idea: all that entered our world and it was the mixture of both. But it was a different Disney in 2015. When I did ‘Tron: Legacy,’ they didn’t own Marvel; they didn’t own Star Wars. We were the work of fantasy and science fiction. And once you have those other things, it makes sense that you put your money into a well-known property and not the weird black nail art student on the corner.
The truth is that it is not difficult to understand that ‘TRON 3’ ceased to be a priority for Disney, because ‘TRON: Legacy’ It’s not like it swept the box office either.. It is true that it had worldwide revenues of 400 million dollars, but it had cost 170 not including the additional investment in marketing.
Also, Garrett Hedlundstar of ‘TRON: Legacy’, revealed a few years ago that the failure of ‘Tomorrowland’ led the studio to completely rethink its production strategy and that this also influenced ‘Tron 3’ not to succeed.
However, it seems that Disney did not completely rule out the project, since a new version of it was announced a couple of years ago with Jared Leto as the main protagonist of the show. And the actor stated very soon that ‘TRON 3’ will arrive sooner rather than later. We’ll see if he ends up getting ahead.