Tron 2 Teaser Trailer Unveiled at Comic-Con
Yesterday, I saw this on Twitter:
Tron 2 film confirmed.
Intrigued, I did some digging and came across an article on IGN that described a trailer that was shown unexpectedly on Thursday at the end of the Walt Disney Pictures panel. It shows a light cycle chase and much more sinister-looking Flynn (again played by Jeff Bridges) before ending up with the number 2 in the Tron logo font as the letters T, R, and N appear around it (to form TR2N) and then fade back out.
This morning there was a Slashdot article that in turn pointed to articles on Gizmodo and Filmstalker with a bootleg video of the trailer (presented below Update 7/28: I grabbed the embed from the Filmstalker article, but as you can see, it’s been pulled. The Gizmodo article still has a non-embeddable version for the time being. Update 7/29: Someone did a pretty decent job cleaning up the video and posted it to YouTube, so it’s back.). The quality is poor as no videotaping is supposed to be going on during the video segments, but it’s good enough to get a feel for what’s going on. Hopefully, an official version of the trailer will be released soon.
Talk of a sequel has been slowly building momentum for some time now. At one one point it was rumored that Pixar wanted to do a remake or a sequel. Around the time of the film’s 20th anniversary, writer and director Steven Lisberger, talked about his interest and ideas for a possible sequel. However, Disney didn’t seem to show any interest in continuing the franchise until it released the game Tron 2.0 in 2003. A first-person shooter set in the computer world, it cleverly extended the metaphors originated in the movie to include modern computing technology such as firewalls, PDAs, and the internet. It was said that the game was going to be used to gauge interest in a sequel, but nothing more was really heard until 2005 when Disney hired a pair of writers to come up with a script for a sequel. It would be two more years before Disney would hire Joseph Kosinski to direct the film (now being written by a writing team from the show Lost). The Hollywood Reporter article detailing this most recent bit of news included this tidbit:
…sources said one of the things Kosinski will be doing is working on a sequence involving the movie’s Light Cycles to work out his vision for the movie.
It would appear that the footage shown at Comic-Con is the culmination of that work. It’s exciting to see that actual progress is being made and that (at least visually) it seems to be faithful to the spirit of the original, but I’m going to try to stay cautiously optimistic until more concrete details are available.
Cindy said,
July 27, 2008 at 11:06 pm
You know, when you mentioned the footage, I was wondering how long before it would get pulled if they said no filming allowed and really wanted to keep it secret. I figured links on the net would bust them, and sure enough, that’s happened already as the video has already been removed.
So I guess I’ll have to actually watch “Tron” at some point, which I figure will help me understand the story much better than just hearing bits and pieces of the plot.