Disney Fostered Tron—Then Killed It
Early treatments had rare promise. But the beloved sci-fi franchise was never safe as part of a spiritless media monopoly.
Released in 1982 by Walt Disney Productions, Tron sustained a contemporary thematic trend in sci-fi movies, most clearly exemplified in Star Wars, one of the era’s greatest commercial successes: the rise of the everyday underdog. Though Luke Skywalker earns a mythic reputation, we meet him as a nobody living on a barren world.
The structure animated most major sci-fi movies at the time. Sarah Connor had no idea that humanity’s future rested on her shoulders, nor did Ellen Ripley know that her craftiness would be the only thing keeping humanity from falling victim to a killer extraterrestrial. Some of the most memorable sci-fi films in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s featured protagonists who stumbled upon destiny and managed to prevail against a power-hungry enemy only through the mixed blessings of fortune and cunning.
In Tron, former ENCOM programmer Kevin Flynn is absorbed into the company’s mainframe as he tries to prove that another employee plagiarized his game and leveraged it to become an executive. Flynn learns that in this world, lines of code manifest as “programs” who take on the appearance of their human programmers.
Fighting alongside a security program named Tron, who was designed by his co-worker and ally Alan Bradley, and wielding the extra powers granted to him as a “User,” Flynn ultimately manages to escape the digital world, freeing the programs from the tyranny of the Master Control Program, and attaining proof that his game was plagiarized in the process.
Critics and general audiences praised the film, but at the time Disney didn’t pursue a sequel. Tron made $50 million on a $17 million budget, while Star Wars made an outrageous $775 million on $11 million. For decades, it seemed like Tron’s vast potential as a franchise would only be realized through video games.
Then in 2007, Disney approached Joseph Kosinski with the offer to direct Tron: Legacy. Company producers asked him, “in a post-Matrix world, how do you go back to the world of Tron?” What Kosinski offered in return was a fresh take on the original cult classic. Though Legacy (2010) was criticized for its thin plot, the film visually upgraded the disc wars and light cycle battles that defined the original movie—representing a digital world that feels fresh to contemporary eyes.
Grossing $400 million on a $170 million budget, Legacy became a commercial success. It was bolstered by an acclaimed Daft Punk soundtrack, accompanied by a cross-platform video game, and ultimately followed by Tron: Uprising (2012)—a TV show depicting what occurred between the two films.
Between the events of the movies, Kevin Flynn saw the world behind the computer screen as “a digital frontier.” Hoping to share it with the rest of humanity, he created thousands of programs tasked with creating a perfect system. The most notable of these programs was CLU, a digital replica of himself who he directly tasked with creating this utopia.
For a time, the initiative went well. But then, the ISOs, the first truly indigenous programs of the Grid, emerged. Likening their emergence to “flowers in a wasteland,” Flynn sought to bring the ISOs to the real world while the programs he created saw the ISOs as a blight upon the system, CLU chief among them. And so, CLU betrayed Flynn, driving his creator out to the wastelands, committing the mass genocide of the ISOs, and seemingly killing Tron.
Set after CLU’s ascent to power, Uprising takes place in a city called Argon. The stable life of the protagonist Beck is quickly upended when CLU’s forces occupy the city, indifferent to the programs they harm as they enforce CLU’s agenda. When one of CLU’s soldiers needlessly kills Beck’s best friend, he responds by destroying a statue of CLU, effectively placing himself in the crosshairs of the military occupation.
Truer to the subgenre that birthed the franchise, Beck has no innate powers to aid him in his struggle. Aside from an uncommon willpower that helps him persevere, he’s just as vulnerable as the other residents of Argon. In fact, the events of the series premiere are mostly conveyed through flashbacks, as a stranger dressed as one of CLU’s soldiers interrogates Beck.
This stranger ultimately reveals himself to be Tron, disabled and eager to train a successor to fight for the Grid’s freedom. From that point on, Beck and Tron fight a battle of attrition. As viewers we may watch the show feeling assured of Beck’s safety because he’s the protagonist. But that doesn’t protect him from the burdens of staging a political uprising.
Time and time again, Tron: Uprising demonstrates that there’s no easy way to dismantle an oppressive system. When confronted with overwhelming odds, people die, people turn, and people disbelieve. The series cliffhanger evokes this sense of dread—as CLU arrives in Argon with a fleet of ships to back him—and it’s heightened by the underlying knowledge that even if all of CLU’s lieutenants are dispatched, CLU himself will prevail.
And yet hope endures. Every life Beck saves has a better chance of survival than if he’d done nothing at all. His dogged efforts convince a group of Argon’s residents to defend him in the finale—and attest to a universal truth throughout the franchise: One person (or program) can make a difference, but it takes a collective to make it stick.
The same principle helps frame the franchise itself. Multiple different approaches to the series’ lore refined the world such that a series like Uprising could flesh out the remaining gaps. With Uprising receiving positive reviews, and a sequel to Legacy in the works, the Tron franchise seemed poised to jump from a cult favorite to a cornerstone of modern science-fiction.
Then Disney reneged. The company moved Uprising to a late-night slot, before abandoning the show after viewership dropped. In 2015, Disney announced that the third Tron film wouldn’t be going to production either—once more shelving the franchise.
Some attribute Disney’ decision to abandon its investment to the moderate financial returns of its sci-fi properties, like Tomorrowland (2015). In an interview for his newest film, Top Gun: Maverick, Kosinski lamented the cancellation of his planned sequel to Legacy. “When I made [Legacy, Disney] didn’t own Marvel; they didn’t own Star Wars … and once you’ve got those other things under your umbrella, it makes sense that you’re going to put your money into a known property and not the weird art student with black fingernails in the corner.”
The assessment has merits. Tron has little cultural and financial potential compared to franchises like Marvel and Star Wars. When a company like Disney must choose between a movie that only grosses twice its budget and one that grosses a billion dollars, the decision seems obvious.
But that perspective presumes that Disney had to choose, which clearly isn’t the case when it had $4 billion in its war chest to purchase Marvel Entertainment and Lucasfilm. One would think gaining repute for fostering an original franchise like Tron alongside Star Wars and Marvel might suit an insatiable behemoth like Disney. But the company’s shoddy treatment of Star Wars in particular makes it clear how little effort it will place into producing quality content if it can reap massive profits on the basis of name recognition alone.
If this wasn’t obvious enough with The Force Awakens (2015), which in many aspects is a retread of the original film, it surely was in The Rise of Skywalker (2019) which systematically retconned nearly every advancement that was made in its predecessor The Last Jedi (2017). Going so far as to establish the main antagonist of the original trilogy as the evil mastermind of the sequels, and even bringing him back from the dead without offering a coherent explanation for how he was resurrected,
Disney’s handling of Star Wars’ sequel trilogy spits on the creativity that made the original films so influential. Most new Star Wars content demonstrates that the company now balks at the challenge of doing something original, both because of the labor the effort requires, and for fear of chasing away its fans.
Disney’s priorities are clear: with decades of extended material it could adapt, the company puts in bare minimum effort, content to capitalize off the brand recognition of its assets. The mentality affects even Pixar, as Disney put out most of the acclaimed-studio’s recent original movies on Disney Plus. While Disney pushed Pixar’s last original film Turning Red (2022) to streaming at the last minute, it allowed Lightyear (2022), a spin-off of the Toy Story franchise to debut in theaters.
According to Variety, the company cited the “delayed box office recovery, particularly for family films” as the reason for their “flexibility” regarding what went to Disney Plus rather than theaters. This makes it all the more ironic that Lightyear barely managed to break even.
Disney seems to see little point in fleshing out the world of Tron when it can churn out poorly made stories and wait for the money to flow in, so long as the product has a Star Wars or Marvel tag slapped on. Tron was merely among the first major casualties of Disney’s growing monopoly of intellectual properties. And it may seem that nothing can really be done to compel Disney to change when the empire has its hooks in practically the entire media ecosystem. But one of the simplest solutions might be the easiest one. With Disney forsaking quality because its executives believe they can profit without it, one of the clearest ways to make its change is to stop consuming its half-baked material.
Like most modern conglomerates, Disney has disseminated its resources carefully, so well that we may engage with content not even knowing that it’s owned by the company. But when you keep a show like Uprising in mind, where viewers know that the protagonist is doomed to fail and still see the positive impact he has on the world around him, there’s solace to be found in the idea that doing something in a hopeless situation is better than doing nothing at all. Tron insists that one person doesn’t need the whole world backing them if they choose to be the voice of dissent. Disney’s expanding empire may never indulge another franchise like Tron. But despite the sabotage, so long as viewers leave knowing that even in the face of overwhelming odds you can still find a way to take a stand, Tron’s legacy will endure. ▩