Reboot Failure: No One Wanted to See Tron Without Tron

The flops are coming so fast these days that it’s hard to keep up with them.  When I saw the first images for Tron: Ares, I was mildly interested, but I doubted that Disney would pull a second rabbit out of its hat.  Tron: Legacy was surprisingly good, with decent callbacks to the original and – like Top Gun: Maverick – it used a traditional framing to tell a timeless story of family obligation with a little romance mixed in.

The news that Nine Inch Nails would do the soundtrack further piqued my interest, but then the trailers came out, the cast was revealed and I forgot all about it.  Happily, my Iron Triangle of youtubers provided me with a timely reminder that this dumpster fire was actually defiling movie screens, so here I am to once again dance on the corpse of another Disney failure.

A Franchise Without The Franchise

This morning it’s being reported that the movie is set to lose over $132 million. At this point, it’s actually remarkable that studios keep making the same costly mistakes.  We’ve already done the whole “use the franchise name for an unrelated film” and watched a studio burn down its bank account.  Mad Max without Mad Max was a complete flop, which everyone (except maybe George Miller) saw coming.  It’s weird.  Miller went through the trouble of rebooting his signature hero and finding new actor for a new generation, only to follow it up with a prequel about the sidekick.

Having watched that, Disney’s management thought: “We shall also try this, but it will work because reasons.”

Spoiler alert: it didn’t work.

Girlbossing Is Sooo 2020

Another Disney genius moment was the idea of taking a bit part player from the utterly vile Star Wars: The Acolyte and give her a big role in Tron.  It wasn’t even a good performance and the show tanked hard.  The term “escalating failure” exists for a reason.

But hey, let’s give it the old college try and yet again reduce men to a supporting role in a film with a primarily young male audience and see what happens.  

Oh, wow.  Another flop.  Who could have guessed?

Incompetence Or Deliberate Strategy

At this late date, I’m convinced this isn’t even about ideology anymore.  I’m not even going to break out my They Live spirit shades because this is too stupid to be demonic.

I think there are people high up in Disney who want to see all of the male IPs burned to the ground.  Yes, I’m looking at you, Kathleen Kennedy.  On paper, she seemed the perfect choice to run Lucasfilm, having served as an assistant to George Lucas during his glory years in filmmaking.  Surely his faithful lieutenant could be trusted to protect his most illustrious works and extend their legacy.

Turns out, not so much.  Indeed, every act she has taken has been to diminish those properties, humiliating the main characters and making them pathetic losers.  I don’t know if Kennedy was directly involved with Tron: Ares, but it has all the hallmarks of her work.

Tron: Legacy ended on a high note, and seemed poised for further adventures.  Instead, all of that was tossed in the dumpster to make way for a completely unrelated story that uses its imagery but is otherwise unrelated to any of the concepts behind the Tron franchise.

Is anyone fighting for the user?  Are there any users?  Does anyone care?  The point of the original film was that computers were supposed to be helpful, not the means of control.  Tron: Legacy cleverly built upon these idea, making Encom like Microsoft, endlessly churning out operating system upgrades no one asked for or wants to buy.  I’ve watched multiple reviews, and no one even mentions this, so I assume it’s a dead letter.

This is like making a Top Gun film that takes place almost entirely on the ground, with only one or two flight sequences.  Let’s explore the inner life of the bar crowd: their loves, laughter and relationships!  I’m sure that will be super successful.

Consolidation and Terminal Bloat

I was checking the credits for Tron: Ares and noticed that there are 18 producers for this film.  That’s not a typo – eighteen people got some sort of credit for being a producer, co-producer or executive producer.  Obviously, some of this is pure gamesmanship because compensation for movies is based on the type of credit one gets, but that is an awful lot of fingers to stick in this particular pie.  If you want to know where all the millions of dollars go for these clunkers, that’s your answer.

This is why everything sucks and there is no easy solution other than massive bankruptcies facilitated by lean startups.  The current model in Hollywood is to buy up all the studios and IPs and hold them hostage, creating a pseudo-monopoly so that people will be forced to watch crappy content.

The core weakness of this strategy is that no one actually needs to see new garbage-grade movies created by committees.  The entire industry is more than a century old, and one can spend a lifetime catching up on older, better films.

But be sure to buy them on physical media, or run the risk that Amazon or some other streamer will take away James Bond’s guns or do something else utterly retarded.

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