Joseph Kosinski has an elephant's memory when it comes to bad reviews.
To be fair, I saw “TRON: Legacy” twice before I reviewed it, and I had some nice things to say about the film in terms of design and how Kosinski re-created the world of TRON, but I also strongly disliked the screenplay. I referred to the film as a “Fleshlight” in my review, saying it looks like a real film, but there's nothing alive about it. I think it's a very pretty but completely empty film overall, and if anything, the sheer aesthetic drop-dead beauty of the whole thing only bugged me more. When it came time to do interviews for “Oblivion,” Kosinski turned me down cold because of that “TRON” review. Oh, well.
While “TRON: Legacy” wasn't a disaster, it was a profoundly expensive movie and the numbers don't really add up to making another giant-budget entry in the series. Disney's worked to keep the property alive in the years since the second film, but I'm still not sure I believe there's any real audience hunger here.
Do I want another Daft Punk soundtrack? Sure. But I'll take anything Daft Punk wants to record. I'm also curious to see if they actually pick up the one truly interesting beat from the end of the second film, which saw Quora (Olivia Wilde) emerge from the computer into the real world. I'm also curious to see if they actually use Cillian Murphy as the villain this time, since there were last-minute reshoots that added Murphy to the first film as the nephew of Sark, David Warner's villain character from the first film.
Joseph Kosinski strikes me as being the same sort of filmmaker as Neill Blomkamp, guys who excel at the sort of detail work that you have to do well if you want to make these giant event films, but who aren't that strong with the actual script. Kosinski's two features so far are both gorgeous, and in a way that genuinely impresses me. He is able to make these fantastic worlds of these films feel normal and lived-in, and he has an eye for truly striking images.
This has been rumored since the second film hit theaters, and I'm sure there are some people who are very excited by this. I'd rather see Kosinski get his hands on one of the great SF scripts bouncing around out there than go back to this particular well, but maybe this time he can get it right and then move on to some other work with more box-office clout working for him.
While Disney has not confirmed this news in public yet, Devin Faraci says he's been able to independently verify the news that originally appeared on a Vancouver-based website.