TRON: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski says the long-delayed TRON 3 could still happen at Disney and suspects it will come down to timing. The Mouse House actually started working on a third TRON movie in the months leading up to Legacy's theatrical release in December 2010, with co-writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz developing a story meant to round out the overarching TRON narrative into a proper trilogy. Unfortunately, Legacy ultimately found itself in the awkward position of being a financial success - but only just so.

Having grossed $400 million at the box office against a $170 million budget, Legacy did well enough to warrant a followup from a business perspective, but not enough to land TRON 3 on the fast-track. Even so, the third TRON movie continued to moved forward over the next few years and was gearing up to start production in the fall of 2015 when Disney unceremoniously cancelled it near the end of May that same year. As Garrett Helund (who played Sam Flynn in Legacy) later explained, the studio got cold feet after another expensive live-action tentpole, Tomorrowland, bombed at the box office a week earlier.

Speaking to ComicBook.com in a recent interview, Kosinski said "There's always been an interest since Legacy [for a sequel]. There's always been talk and murmuring of doing another and continuing the story." He went on to point out how TRON has continued to be a part of the Disney brand since Legacy came out ten years ago, most notably with the Tron Lightcycle Power Run (which premiered in Shanghai Disneyland when the park opened in 2016). As Kosinski sees it, "Like anything, it just needs the right confluence of... it's all about timing and the right elements and everything's got to come together for a movie to happen."


Kosinski definitely has a point; after all, it was bad timing which led to TRON 3 being canned in the first place. After that, Disney started moving forward with a TRON reboot starring Jared Leto as a brand-new character names Ares (who was originally meant to appear in TRON 3), but that film has similarly fallen by the wayside over the last few years. Then, just last month, it came to light Disney had cancelled an untitled TRON live-action Disney+ series developed by writer John Ridley (12 Years a Slave) sometime in the last year without even announcing it was happening to begin with. Kosinski, for his part, seems unfazed by how long it's taken to get anything new TRON-related off the ground, telling ComicBook.com:

"... I don't ever see TRON being something where you pump one out every two years. You just can't. They're too hard to make. It's got to be a passion project and it's got to really be reaching for something different and innovative and ambitious, because that's in the DNA of it."
History speaks for itself there. The original Tron broke new ground with its use of computer-generated environments and visual effects in 1982, only for Legacy to continue pushing the envelope with its immersive 3D filmmaking and Jeff Bridge's digitally de-aged performance as the villain Clu (a digital duplicate of his human character, Kevin Flynn). Problem is, technical innovation requires money and right now Disney is hesitant to green-light any costly live-action movies that aren't remakes of their animated classics - and, in turn, surefire box office bets - like Aladdin and The Lion King. Life moves pretty fast in Hollywood, though, so who knows: if things suddenly change, the Mouse House might just decide to go ahead and roll the dice on TRON 3 in the foreseeable future.