Completely agree. I really enjoyed it -- graphics, overall concept, and love the soundtrack. Of course it has its quirks and plot holes, but I enjoy it nonetheless. :)
Tron: Legacy didn't have a plot. The soundtrack was excellent, the CGI was alright. It was a very tame for-the-money sequel with no point of view about anything at all.
> first attempt to visualise the digital realm itself
Few people realise that in 1982 there was no CGI. Tron is mainly
rotoscoped [1] but also a composite of creative effects and
techniques.
Tron is a remarkable movie for a different reason most people miss
today. It was seminal in defining the aesthetic of computer graphics
to come by "faking it till you make it".
Without the actual technology for model wirefame and rendering at the
time, the visual directors (Steven Lisberger and Donald Kushner) used
a combination of drawn animation (Jean Giraud), special lighting and
costume, and actual CGI overlays from the "Super Foonly F-1" PDP-10
[2]
There was a full 15 minutes of true CGI in the first film, an incredible accomplishment back in 1982. It was in fact too much CGI for any one company to produce, they had to hire 4 different companies to handle the workload (MAGI, Triple-I, Robert Abel and Associates, and Digital Effects). They broke up the VFX scenes between them, trying to play to the individual strengths of each company's rendering system. If you pay close attention to the film you can tell which scenes were done by which company.
The backgrounds shown during the live action scenes (with actors) were mostly hand drawn.
Thanks for that link. I went back and watched a few clips. My goodness
how that's different from my memories of 1982! Weird thing is I can't
remember that I saw that 15 minutes of embryonic CGI as being
"computer graphics", long before I'd played Wolfenstein and having
only seen vector graphics in arcade consoles at the pier. How our
perceptions have changed.
Sorry. I can well imagine that the sequel was shite. Also in
comparison to the first movie real CGI failed to live up to the "fake"
standard set by the first.
Hollywood doesn't greenlight sequels based on how good or bad a film actually is. It's all about the numbers.
The budget for Tron Legacy was $170 million, and it made $400 million at the box office.
That sounds quite good - it doubled its money! - except film budgets don't include marketing costs, which for a blockbuster can be as much as the budget itself. I doubt that Tron Legacy broke even. If a blockbuster isn't making at least three times its budget it's going to be seen as something of a disappointment at the studio.
> That sounds quite good - it doubled its money! - except film budgets don't include marketing costs, which for a blockbuster can be as much as the budget itself.
I thought it was the opposite? Hollywood accounting, I thought, meant that if the movie even breaks even then it is financially good because they include all costs even the movie theater costs as expenses. What am I missing?
This source [0], which is from a company selling analysis services of movies financials (so probably accurate) say total costs $200m, which likely includes marketing.
Note also that the movie had a sizeable merchandising output, so the $400m box-office doesn't tell the full story; total revenue was probably several millions higher.
Double its money seemed to be enough to greenlight a sequel. Disney started work on a sequel almost immediately, it just got stuck in Development Hell. That's the other reason sequels do or do not get made: they still need to be developed as projects with all the pieces of writer/director/script/plan and Hollywood is just as notorious for how much of a hellscape that can be sometimes as they are for their weird, harsh accounting.
Basically this for me with a more positive slant. The first scenes of Sam and into discovering what’s inside the Grid for the first time are absolutely magical.
Also, RPO was Spielberg who hasn't worked at all with Disney since the weird conflux of things that was Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and so RPO is nothing like a Disney movie in any sense.
