With the DVD and Blu-Ray released on April 18, Joseph Kosinski is back on the Tron: Legacy publicity treadmill, teasing some details of where the franchise might go next. He also provided Coming Soon with a brief update on Disney's reworking of The Black Hole.
Kosinski isn't hugely expansive about Tron 3, and doesn't confirm the rumours that a teaser trailer will feature as an easter egg on the DVD sets. But he will go so far as to admit that, "We laid enough groundwork in Legacy that there's a lot of kind of jumping off points for additional places to go. I think Legacy ended on a very open-ended, very interesting note. If stuff can cross over [from the Grid to the real world], just imagine the possibilities of what that means for the next chapter."
The director says that future films will remain as tough to make as Legacy clearly was, since all involved with the franchise are committed to pushing their FX technology as far as it will go: "If we do another one, I think we owe it to Tron to figure out what's the next frontier." It's the legacy of Legacy, if you will (although take note of that "if").
If there's a question mark over future films though, we can certainly expect the animated series Tron: Uprising sometime in 2012 on the Disney XD network. "I'm not directly involved with that," says Kosinski, "but I do know that it takes place between the moment that Clu took over the grid and the purge and Tron being repurposed by Clu, and the opening of our film. So it's going to fill out some interesting stories about Tron himself. Legacy played really well to people in their twenties and thirties, but it actually didn't bring in kids. So we hope Uprising will bring a new generation of fans in the same way that Clone Wars has brought a new generation to Star Wars."
And what of team Tron's in-development version of The Black Hole? There's nothing new here, but there is a reiteration of all the promises that got us excited last time. "It's a reimagining: definitely not a sequel," Kosinski explains. "We know so much more about black holes now and the phenomena that surround them and the incredible effects on time and space that they have, which allows for some really interesting concepts and stories to tell. We're working with Travis Beacham on the script right now, and it's really exciting reimagining of what it's like to go in a deep interstellar mission. We're going to preserve some of those iconic elements of the first one that people love. But beyond that..."