Back in 1982 when Tron came out in theaters, there weren’t box office reports on the news. The general public usually didn’t know or care how much a movie made.
If a movie made a ton of money, like E.T., you’d hear about it, and if a movie was a big flop, like Heaven’s Gate, you’d hear about that as well, but again, the grosses for movies weren’t all over the place like baseball box scores back in the day.
The reason why I bring this up is I had no idea Tron was a flop when I first saw it when I was ten years old, and couldn’t have cared less. I absolutely loved Tron, and thought it was one of the most amazing movies I’d ever seen, but despite the endless fan love, it wasn’t a big hit.
The fans have kept Tron’s legend going all these years to the point where the Tron Legacy sequel was made nearly thirty years later. Even though the box office for Legacy wasn’t stellar either, it made enough money for another Tron film to get the go-ahead from Disney.
So it looks pretty good we’ll have a third Tron down the road, there’s been one in development for a while, and Olivia Wilde recently let it be known she’d love to come back for another installment.
Wilde played Quorra in Tron Legacy, and she recently told Hitfix and Giant Freakin Robot, “I loved the collaborative effort that was Tron, and I think now with the time to really focus on character development after we’ve established so much exposition, we can really have some fun. I think everyone’s game for it. There’s so many directions we could go.”
And indeed, much like Star Wars, there’s a lot of places you could go in the Tron universe. There’s also much room for improvement with the last Tron film as well, although to be fair, the original was never perfect. Legacy director Joseph Kosinski recently promised that the third film will be the Empire Strikes Back of the series, a very tough claim to live up to, but wouldn’t that be nice if he could actually pull that off?
