What Tron: Legacy Can Teach Moviemakers

If you are saying that the Comic readership niche does not represent the Mass Market. Then Yeah I agree wholeheartedly. The franchise did not have a name to attract the younger audience. If the lead had been one of the Twilight kids. You would have seen more Box Office. Hollywood and comics do not give youth their due. When action stars get up in age..you have to watch what the kids are going for and adjust accordingly.

Dear Spinoff Online
Please stop, your not as smart as you think you are.

Over hype always creates a backlash. TRON LEGACY has been over hyped for so long that now its cool to bash it because its
A: part of teh evil Disney empire.
and B: forcing a franchise like stated.

However– what the F**K more do people want from an event tentpole film?????????
Every single frame of this movie is visually stunning!!!!!!!

The Music is THE BEST score in years. id say ONLY inception and Darkknight are as good.

The action is pure adrenaline popcorn fun.

The STORY is NOT bad at all. In fact there are layers to it that people dismis because of its Disney/franchise backlash.

Honestly other than INCEPTION ( which was too convoluted that people say its ultra smart) what tentpole EVENT film in 2010 beats this???

TRON LEGACY is a phenominal movie experiance.

Wel firstly i think you are full of shit.

Also- i too think that under 60 million for a movie of this size is a bad sign.

I am a 37 yrold nerd who thought it was phenominal– but ive seen decades of tentpole films and know the first movie in & out.

This is NOT a bad film AT ALL. its actually an AWSOME film but not for a wide demographic.

The 3rd movie will unfortunatly be dumbed waaaaaay down for kids i bet.

The reactions to this piece are as hilarious as they are predictable. But it’s probably not a good idea on McMillan’s part to tell the “Comic Con crowd” that they’re irrelevant in gauging public interest and Hollywood shouldn’t pander to them.

All I know is, I saw it yesterday and had fun. Could it have had a better story and better cgi face for the young version of Jeff Bridges? Yeah. Could the movie have had better acting? Yeah. But I still had fun. A fun popcorn flick. Remember fun?

Go take your mood meds.

Spinoff Online throwing more dirt on Tron: Legacy again? What a surprise following the unfathomable December 1st article “Is Tron: Legacy already a flop?” published weeks before the movie was released.

Man, somebody REALLY wants this movie to fail…

Why does this article need to be prevented from being published?

I think the article is spot-on. He’s not saying the movie was horrid and he’s not saying that movies like it shouldn’t get made but he is questioning the idea that Comic-con is an important vehicle for a movie.

I feel the same thing about a lot of nerd conventions–starting with E3–why some of the nerd elite feel they have a grasp on American popular culture is beyond me. The truth is that because a marketing exec or PR chick takes an interest in a nerd website, nerd evite or fanzine to promote their corporate shenanigans and invites those same geeks to early ‘meetings’ and industry parties–the reality is that they are hob-nobbing people who know more know what’s cool in America than the Taliban.

Tron Legacy is cool but it was nowhere near as cool as the geeks thought (same with Scott Pilgrim) and as a result you got egg on your face. Deal with it.

How about stop with the 3D crap and just make a good movie? It seems like every 3D movie is relying on it’s 3D gimmick to cover up the fact the story and characters are stupid.

Good points, horribly wrong direction.

RE: LESSON ONE

ComiCon has been commandeered by Hollywood. Hollywood press big and small descends on San Diego just like they do Cannes, Toronto and Sundance — because, just like the first two, this is a place where tentpole films get noticed in quantity. And any film that gets buzz on the floor in San Diego is equivalent to any film that gets buzz on the red carpet anywhere else.

And nerd culture *is* mainstream culture. The tentpole films that do succeed are just as much rooted in nerd culture as Tron: Legacy and Scott Pilgrim: most are from comicbooks, fantasy novels and science fiction. They’ve been marketed outwards, and for the moment it’s cool to walk around with superhero logos on t-shirts. It’s also become standard to talk about devices in nerd terms like memory and processor speed — another geek speak conversation.

RE: LESSON TWO

Star Wars and Star Trek are pure nostalgia. EVERYthing they’ve put out has been compared to the original three — either the first three films as in Star Wars, or the first three seasons as in Star Trek.

Tron was just as epic as Star Trek, if not more so: revisit the original and compare how many of its wild concepts are accepted easily today — most notably the idea of the digital avatar in a computerized world, such as The Matrix worked with or even our own aliases here.

It’s special effects that made Tron stand out. It’s the first film that comes to mind when you say “early CGI” even though Star Trek II beat it to the punch. And that’s because its visual vision is what makes it distinct, just as Blade Runner (another film from the same year) is also now acknowledged for its futuristic vision come true.

Tron: Legacy knows enough to keep those elements in that make it distinctive as part of the Tron universe. Where Legacy really fails has more to do with the story itself and its direction: the original used the same man vs technology theme as Star Wars, whereas this one’s theme doesn’t make it as easy to find a hero to root for.

RE: LESSON THREE

This is the biggest problem I have with your criticism. A franchise is built by the company, not the fans. And it’s done quickly to keep fans buying because new fans take much longer to create.

So Disney is right on this. And that didn’t stop Avatar (first of three!), Dark Knight (holy bat-product!) or any other big picture doing the same thing.

Where Disney has the problem — where you too have the problem — is the comparison with the old. Too many critics of the movie and the system are making comparisons with personal ideas rather than the film itself and today’s market. “It wasn’t as good as…” or “Why make the sequel when the original…” are heard far too often.

Legacy stands as a chapter on its own. It may not be a great chapter, but unlike the split-pictures like Potter, Lord Of The Rings and the upcoming Hobbit, it does have a definite beginning and end for the hero’s quest. I watched it with little problem understanding what the filmmakers were saying in the story and the message behind the story and, for me, if a film does that it works on its own.

Fed on a steady diet of Disney and Warner comics propaganda, critical thinking is impossible and the Ceaselessly Bowing Robots can do nothing more than echo fragments of the opinions of others.

Such is life.

My only problem with TRON: LEGACY is that the Titular character was more or less a background character in his own flick…. I didn’t come to see a Tron flick to watch TRON take a back seat.

I important thing to remember about Tron:Legacy (and someone also mentioned Tangled) is Disney is the ONE company that can profit off of franchise making movies for YEARS (how many DVD copies of Snow White [1937] did Disney sell last year?)
Will Disney be happier if these movies make $1 Bil worldwide gross, yes. BUT Disney WILL still profit from these franchises. Case in point is the already announced Tron cartoon on DisneyXD. This movie doesn’t have to be a blockbuster for that cartoon to be successful and make money for Disney. Also one of Pixar’s worst performing movies was Cars, but it is Disney’s MOST successful merchandising vehicle.

Wow…. It’s an article in an article,,, Sorry but you wrote more than what was necessary. LOL