TRON: Legacy

This article is written from a
Real World perspective.

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Teaser Poster

Tron Legacy (also known as TR2N) is the sequel film to TRON. Joseph Kosinski makes his feature film directorial debut with Tron Legacy, while the previous film director, Steven Lisberger, returns as a producer. Jeff Bridges reprises his role as Kevin Flynn, and Bruce Boxleitner his roles as Alan Bradley and Tron, while Garrett Hedlund portrays Flynn's 27 year-old son, Sam. The other cast members include Olivia Wilde, Beau Garrett, Michael Sheen and James Frain. Writers Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis (who both worked on the hit television show, "Lost") wrote pen the screenplay.

Working Titles

For almost a year, the sequel had many working titles, some official and others were accidental mispellings. The project was first known as TR2N, then just TRON. Other people started calling the movie Tron 2.0, which would have caused confusion between the movie and the 2003 video game of the same name. Other news sources said that the title was TRZ, and TRN however the latter turned out to be the code name for the movie during production.

Obviously, the constant name-changing proved to be nerve-racking and hard-to-keep up for fans.

Plot

In an news article released on March 2, 2009 by AICN, details were released concerning the plot, characters and the name of the movie.

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

The story takes place approximately 27 years after the original. The movie starts in 1989. Kevin Flynn has made ENCOM the biggest computer company in the world, thanks to his famous videogames, including Tron, an arcade game secretly based off of his adventures in cyberspace in 1982. Flynn gets married and has a son, named Sam, but he is widowed in 1985 and later that year, retires from ENCOM to create "a digital frontier that will reshape the human condition". In 1989, Flynn disappears and he leaves behind Sam when he disappears. Flynn was in charge of ENCOM when he disappeared, so ENCOM is taken over by his friend Alan Bradley.

20 years later, Sam Flynn is now 27 and Alan Bradley (the programmer who wrote Tron) receives a call from Kevin Flynn's old arcade, which has been abandoned for 20 years. Sam decides to head over to the arcade to investigate and look for his dad. He turns on the power for the arcade and notices the "Tron" arcade machine. He decides to put a quarter in to play it but drops the quarter into a crack on the floor. He then notices that the crack goes behind the Tron cabinet and finds a hidden doorway emitting a blue light behind the cabinet. Sam is then digitized into the computer world.

It is then discovered that Clu has been rerezzed. He has been programmed by Flynn to travel around the computer world and make it better, however he has been corrupted and is creating his own interpretation of that perfect world. Clu has it out for a kind of program called ISOs & wants to eradicate them. The ISOs believe Sam Flynn is the one who will free them from CLU's belligerence.

Somewhere in the computer world, the real Kevin Flynn is whizzing around in a classic 2nd Generation Lightcycle . Will he help in the battle against Clu?

A new vehicle called a Lightjet will appear in the movie. They will have jetwalls too. There will be a battle against lightcycles and lightjets and a big disk battle scene.

Spoilers end here.

Cast

Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn/Clu/Clu 2.0
Bruce Boxleitner as Alan Bradley/Tron
Garrett Hedlund as Sam Flynn
Olivia Wilde as Quorra
Beau Garrett as Gem
Serinda Swan as a Siren
Yaya DaCosta as a Siren
James Frain as Jarvis
Dan Shor as Rinzler
Michael Sheen as Castor
Brandon Jay McLaren as Sobel
Amy Esterle as Young Mrs. Flynn
Elizabeth Mathis as a Siren
Tony Besson as Pete Redken
Owen Best as Young Sam Flynn
Michael Teigen as Green Light Cycle Rider

Development hell and pre-production

Rumors

In the late 1990s, there were speculation that Disney would make a sequel film, due to the original film's big cult following. On July 29, 1999 ZDnet news that a Tron sequel or remake was being considered by Pixar. ^[1] Through out the next several years, many false rumors that a Tron sequel was in production or being developed were reported by various news websites.

On January 13, 2005, Variety reported that Disney had hired Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal to write a sequel to Tron confirming speculation that a sequel was in the works.

Proof-of-concept Trailer

On July 24, 2008 at the Comic-Con convention in San Diego, California, Disney showed a surprise trailer for the sequel, which was called TR2N.

The footage began with an update of the lightcycle duel from the original film, pitting a blue program against a yellow one with the two racing through a futuristic landscape. While in pursuit, the blue program manage evade the mysterious yellow program. However, the yellow program took a shortcut and drove in front of the blue racer, making him crash into the yellow driver's jetwall. The blue program flew off his cycle and into the air before landing on the road and almost falling into an abyss, where the road stopped. Meanwhile, the duel is being observed from a high, cliff-side structure by a human figure wearing regular clothing – an older, bearded Kevin Flynn played again by Jeff Bridges. The yellow program pulls his lightcycle over and climbs off, grabing his Identity disk which now appears as a glowing ring. As the unknown yellow driver approaches the blue program, the defeated racer yells out to his opponent, "You won, okay? It's just a game!" The yellow racer, turns on his helmet light revealing to the driver (and the audience) that he is Clu, Flynn's old hacker program who was derezzed by the MCP in 1982. Clu's replies to the program, "Not anymore...", and throws his disk at blue program, killing him. The footage ended with a '2' appearing in the traditional Tron font and the title, TR2N, emerging around it, then fading away to leave the number.

Joseph Kosinski directed the promo and is currently directing the film. Kosinski previously directed commercials for Gears of War, Halo 3, Apple Computers and others, and was noted for his skill at blending photo-realistic CGI with real actors and scenery. Lost writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz are slated to write the film.

Originally, the test trailer did not prove that a Tron sequel was in production, but it showed that Disney was serious about a sequel. Some speculated that the trailer was not only to see how the public will react to the trailer, but to show the executives at Disney what a Tron sequel will look like. Producer Sean Bailey later said in an interview that if the trailer did not had a good reaction, the movie would have never been made.

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Greenlighted

On September 24, 2008, Disney showcased its upcoming films in a daylong presentation for Disney partners and the media at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood, CA. One of the many films showcased was TR2N, in which the same trailer from Comic-Con was shown to the crowd. According to AICN:

“

They showed the TRON 2 trailer (and everyone went nuts), the same that was shown at Comic Con and [Walt Disney Studios chairman] Dick [Cook] said, 'it was for sure a go'.

”

Viral Marketing

On July 21, 2009, several movie-related websites posted they had received via mail a pair of "Flynn's Arcade" golden coins along with a flash drive. Its content was an animated gif image that showed css code lines. Four of them were put together and part of the code was cracked, revealing the url to Flynnlives.com, a fiction site mantained by activists who believe Kevin Flynn is alive, even though he's been missing since 1989. Clicking on a tiny spider in the lower section of the main page leads to a countdown clock that hits zero on Thursday, July 22, 9:30pm. Within the Terms of Use Section, an address was found. It lies at San Diego, CA, nearby the city's convention center, where the Comic Con 2009 is taking place and some footage/info on the sequel is expected to be seen. Many suspect the Arcade has been re-opened at that location.

A second viral site, homeoftron.com, has been found. It portrays some of the history of Flynn's Arcade as well as a fan memoir section.