Top Gun: Maverick is the highest-grossing domestic film in the directing career of Joseph Kosinski, beating out 2010’s Tron: Legacy. The follow-up to the 1982 cult classic Tron was the directorial debut from Kosinski, and pulled in nearly $400 million at the worldwide box office. Despite having a 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, the box office returns for Tron: Legacy were good enough for Disney to initially green light a sequel, but the film remained in development hell for a number of years before ultimately being scrapped. In a recent interview with Vulture, Kosinski spoke about his plans for Tron: Ascension:
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Tron: Ascension was reportedly set to return Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde in the lead roles, along with having Kosinski in the director’s chair once again. Had the film been made, it would have been the third feature directed by Kosinski following 2013’s Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise. When it comes to the reasoning behind the third Tron film being canned, Kosinski believes it was due to some major acquisitions made by Disney at that time:
“I got so close. I really tried. I got close in 2015, and Disney pulled the plug on it. I hadn’t built anything, but I had the whole movie storyboarded and written. I was really excited because it was inverting the idea. It was all that stuff coming into our world, and it was about the blending of the two.”
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“It was a very different Disney by 2015. When I made Tron: Legacy, they didn’t own Marvel; they didn’t own Star Wars. We were the play for fantasy and science fiction. And once you’ve got those other things under your umbrella, it makes sense that you’re going to put your money into a known property and not the weird art student with black fingernails in the corner - that was Tron.”
Joseph Kosinski Has Been Quite Successful Even Without a Tron Sequel
In the end, Kosinski says he was glad to not direct Tron: Ascension because it opened him up to make Only the Brave in 2017. The firefighting drama not only starred Josh Brolin and Jeff Bridges, but Miles Teller and Jennifer Connelly, leading Kosinski to put the latter two actors in Top Gun: Maverick. Kosinski reunited with Teller once again for the upcoming Netflix film Spiderhead, which also stars Chris Hemsworth and Jurnee Smollett. Even though he didn’t get to make his Tron sequel, Kosinski has quickly become one of the premier directors in Hollywood.
As for the future of the Tron franchise, Disney tapped Garth Davis to lead the development on a third film, which will reportedly star Jared Leto. Davis has mainly made smaller films throughout his career, most notably 2016’s Lion starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman. The third Tron film would be the first blockbuster of Davis’ career, but updates have been few and far between on its development. It may be some time before audiences return to the Grid to see where the story of Tron goes next.
