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Before it got released on DVD today, Tron: Legacy managed to play in theaters long enough to establish Joseph Kosinski as the highest-grossing first-time director of a live-action film in Hollywood history. The film’s $399 million global gross recently eclipsed the $397.5 million gross that JJ Abrams turned in on 2006′s Mission: Impossible 3.
Now, such a distinction is relative. Tron: Legacy cost between $165 million and $170 million to make and a comparable amount to market. Sam Mendes made his debut on the $15 million American Beauty, which grossed $356 million worldwide in 1999. Jan De Bont’s debut on the $30 million Speed turned in a $350 million worldwide gross in 1994. Ticket prices were lower when American Beauty and Speed were released, and Tron: Legacy had the extra benefit of higher 3D pricing. American Beauty and Speed were extravagantly profitable. Disney will make some money on Tron: Legacy, but they won’t need to back up the Brink’s truck.
But Tron: Legacy’s performance certainly gives the studio reason to think it has poured the foundation for a franchise. Disney has begun work on a sequel, which Kosinski is constructing with original writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz. Maybe because of Tron: Legacy’s pricey launch and heightened expectations, I had the impression that the film had been a bit underwhelming, despite a $44 million opening weekend. But looks are deceiving. For one thing, despite the film’s big budget, Tron: Legacy had the benefit of zero first-dollar box office gross participants. Another pic that opened around the same time, Little Fockers, was teeming with them.
Should Kosinski’s crown buy a Tron: Legacy encore? Its performance certainly compares well to other 2D films that launched franchises. Tron: Legacy out-grossed the Chris Nolan-directed Batman Begins ($373 million) and the Abrams-directed Star Trek ($386 million), both of which were based on brands far more famous than the long-forgotten 1982 original Tron. For that matter, Tron: Legacy out-grossed The Bourne Identity ($214 million) and its sequel The Bourne Supremacy ($288 million). It also bested X-Men Origins: Wolverine ($373 million), National Treasure ($347 million) and The Fast and the Furious ($207 million). It out-grossed all the films in that franchise. Beyond that, the film fed other Disney divisions. The Tron: Legacy soundtrack sold 615,000 copies worldwide, and the movie spawned ElecTRONica, a featured attraction at Disney’s California Adventure theme park. A Tron: Legacy rollercoaster for the new Shanghai theme park is under discussion.
Now, just because a studio makes it out alive after a big bet on a film doesn’t mean it’s franchise city. Said one vet: “Sometimes, you say, ‘We got away with one,’ and move on. From Terminator to Bourne, you can usually tell if the audience wants more.” Based on the Tron: Legacy gross and high DVD pre-sales, Disney will go for two. And Kosinski seeded the original with plot points that lend to a sequel.
When Kosinski gets to Tron: Legacy 2 is another matter. He has other projects that include a remake of Black Hole at Disney, with a script being written by Travis Beacham, writer of Guillermo del Toro’s next film, Pacific Rim. Kosinski is most likely to next direct Oblivion, a film that has Tom Cruise interested. Disney gave that picture back to Kosinski recently, because its post-apocalyptic vision didn’t fit the Disney family film mold, and attempts to make it PG was strangling Kosinski’s vision. Kosinski’s reps at Verve and Anonymous Content are shopping it, and I’ve heard Universal is among three suitors giving it serious consideration.
I am not sure how long Kosinski’s first-time director milestone will last. Hollywood has become bolder about giving mega-budget features to first-timers. Carl Rinsch is directing Keanu Reeves in 47 Ronin at a reported $175 million budget, and Rupert Sanders is directing Universal’s Snow White and the Huntsman with Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron and a Huntsman to be named later after Viggo Mortensen withdrew. Either could topple Kosinski from his perch.
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I guess animated films don’t count. When Pete Doctor directed Monsters Inc. it grossed $529m.
ahem: “highest-grossing first-time director of a LIVE-ACTION film in Hollywood history.”
Ahem: there is no difference between LIVE ACTION dollars and ANIMATED dollars. Except that Docter has done it TWICE now. UP made $731 Million.
While tron legacy was a pile of crap.
Scott, no one said there the dollars are different. The comparisons are different. Get over yourself.
So “Tron-Legacy” WAS a Disney success, after all.
Funny…that’s not what the brilliant analysts here on the Deadline commentary pages said, though.
According to those clowns, Tron was a failure of “epic proportions”, and Disney standa to lose a fortune on Tron.
Some of these fools claimed that Disney failed by using Kosinski, a first time director.
Reality: Tron-Legacy, Disney, and Kosinski, turned out to ALL be winners!
Bottom Line: Ignore idiots who spout off shit on opening weekend. Disney is far smarter-and richer!- than you poor unemployed Disney haters.
Keep failing UP Hollywood!!!!
VERY well put!!!
People can judge “Tron” by the math all they want. It doesn’t change the fact that it was a terrible movie directed by someone who lacked the vision to deliver a truly epic and memorable piece of material.
Agreed.
Truly epic piece of material? Piss off. That script tried to throttle the film to death. The script in the second act espcially was dire, it made a good 40 minutes of the film intolerable. The only reason the film recieved any good reviews because Kosinksi delivered a visually bold and effective adventure, made phenomenal use of music to keep the audience pumped (whereas the script proceeded to defecate in a corner) and was able to generate good performances.
The Script sucked, Kosinski survived a generic stinker to give an entertaining film.
The tron reboot was terrible. It came with a built in audience and some computer cache but. This guy’s fall will make M Knight look like Scorcese. He will be competing for scripts with Uwe in a year
Ditto.
The god-awful Tron had,
1) A built-in, pre-marketed curiosity factor,
2) A uniquely (theoretically) 3D friendly premise/story, and
3) 3D pricing out the wazoo.
But now Tron is a known (awful) quantity.
II will be a bomb of epic proportions, as Dis is desperate for a future tentpole (any tentpole) in the wake of a string of sizeable failures.
When the bad times hit and Hollywood doesn’t know what else to do, they usually throw (other people’s) money at the problem.
With BO off 20% plus year-to-date, I can hear the Hollywood hysteria from across the country…this is like asking the Entourage crew to handle brain surgery…
Tron came with a built in audience?
Based on those numbers, I think Disney should put a halt on all other feature film productions and just make TRON sequels and prequels from now on. A digital 15 yr old Jeff Bridges in a prequel would be awesome…. he says sarcastically.
I actually think Disney should change their name to Tron.
Next, Mike Flemming’s piece on how Al Gore really won the 2000 election and should be considered one of our greatest presidents.
ahhhhhh HAHAHAHHAHAHA!!!
Well, since you injected politics into this, I’ll bite. I’m not a member of any political party. However, as a an attorney, I believe that the Supreme Court made the wrong decision. Sadly, we’ll never ACTUALLY KNOW who won the election. The Supreme Court should have remanded the case back to the Florida Supreme Court and ordered it to have a uniform recounting standard. Then, we would have known who actually won the 2000 election.
I love it when reporters buy the Disney publicists’ revisionist history of the disaster that was TRON. Sean REALLY wants to keep his job as this was his first movie and a movie that he was PRODUCING. He’s doing everything he can to smoke screen the fact that TRON was a $220MM budgeted money sinkhole for Disney.
The announcement that they are writing a sequel was a way of spinning the movie so it looked like it MUST have been good enough to make a sequel. The reality is the writers are actually off doing their pilot and Disney will never make this sequel if Ross has his way.
Oh look the jealous jennies are back.
$220 million? Why stop there? How about a $350 million “sink hole?” $400 million? Since we’re just making up numbers, how about a cool $500 million?
Question to the genius’ here on Deadline, how is it that Star Trek cost the same to make as Tron Legacy, and did less box office, and yet was this huge success whereas Tron was this “epic failure?”
You Hollywood rejects are a funny bunch. People here on this site are almost always overtly (some would say stupidly) negative, and almost always WRONG.
P.S. If you guys are so smart how come no one is asking you to make movies?
I hear ya Bro!
First of all Star Trek cost $130 million as compared to Tron Legacy’s $170 million.
Also it made more of it’s gross in the US ($257 million) than Tron. Studios get to keep a larger share of the box office gross from domestic receipts which is why the US market is still the most important (though the increasing size of the international market will change this in the coming years).
Star Trek was also unlike Tron Legacy was very well received which means it has a real potential to grow it’s audience by the time the sequel comes out. Tron got a very mixed reception and it’s unlikely that it’s audience is going to substantially increase.
That’s just nonsense.
1. The studio take for overseas box office is only marginally lower, especially for studios – like Disney – which have an international distribution network of its own and don’t have to depend on third-party distributors and, thus, sharing the revenues with them. The only difference between domestic and foreign grosses for a company like Disney are additional foreign taxes/surcharges (which are usually small percentages anyway) and shipping costs. FAIL.
2. The budget for Star Trek, according to Box Office Mojo, was $150 million. $20 million in savings for Star Trek, with a $16 million box office advantage for Tron. Marginal to no difference either way. FAIL.
3. Star Trek was ALREADY a known commodity when it was released. Tron was just a cult 1982 film. If anything, as the article above explained, Tron Legacy numbers opened the door to creating a whole new franchise and is well positioned to consolidate and expand its potential market, not the other way around. EPIC FAIL.
Do you even read the stuff you write? Do you just stuff up to fit whatever argument you are making? You’re not making an argument, you’re spinning.
I don’t know why we have a group of cackling little birds here on Deadline who seem hell bent to prove EVERY MOVIE is a financial disaster, even when they’re not. They do this in spite of the fact that the numbers they offer are almost always fictional. Yet, despite these proclamations, they never acknowledge that studios continue to record larger and larger profits. There is a disconnect somewhere.
Well, actually, the difference is that Disney spent $130 million marketing TRON and Paramount spent closer to $70 million marketing STAR TREK. Not a huge difference financially, but important. And, it will take a long time for TRON to become profitable…
If you look at the numbers (including merchandise/ElecTRONica) you’ll see that it was NOT failure. What you have to understand is that Tron is now a brand, much like Star Wars. Sure the movie didn’t do as well as they hoped but they didn’t need it to. The merchandise/ElecTRONica compensated for it. And all that combined equals profit.
Thank you for pointing out how much $$$$$ Disney has made off of ElecTRONica, way more then they spend to put it on, and it is scheduled to run at least through the summer. Plus all the merchandise sales and the soundtrack. Looking at DVD/Blu ray sales it is doing really good too.
You know a movie is bad when you’re high on mushrooms and you’re bored.
TRON: LEGACY was that bad.
Tron: Legacy was a roller coaster ride. Either you loved it or hated it from start to finish. The script itself had some serious issues, but Kosiniski saved that film from the toilet. Visually amazing. Plus Olivia Wilde…
I think it’s amazing – all of the directors mentioned should be proud of themselves – I’m sure the journey for Kosinski was a difficult one and full of challenges that most first time directors never have to deal with. Congrats on a big achievement.
We are making a Tron Trilogy of sequels we’re filming three new Tron movies all in a row. We learned our lesson on Mars Needs Moms that was a terrible experience but Tron made us very happy. We at Disney know what we’re doing we always do things right over here. How’s that Mr. Bailey should I press Submit Your Comment now?
with 3d imax $20 tickets tron 2.0 should have cleared 500 million…a near failure give disney 3+ years of promotion
I would go even further and say Tron:Legacy should have done 500-1 billion. Alice in Wonderland did 1 billion. Sure, Alice had Tim Burton and he’s established a legacy of his own particular quality but why didn’t Tron:Legacy do better?
The move had serious issues and the screen writers and the director screwed up. Who was more to blame? I don’t know, but i’m sure the inside people do and maybe that’s why this guy is getting another chance to direct.
I was really looking forward to this movie and it completely let me down. The middle part of the movie is where it started to go downhill and it never recovered. So much potential for this movie and it just got pissed away. Disney better not let any of the original writers get near Tron 3.
If Disney didn’t think Tron:Legacy could make 500-1 billion why did it spend so much on P&A? huh? Disney defenders??????????
All Kosinski did was regurgitate the first film and taint it with a rubber and leather while also trying to rip off “The Matrix.”
Kosinski has NO IMAGINATION. Neither did any of the writers on “Tron: Legacy.” All six of them.
After Sam escapes, the movie practically grinds to a halt until the very end flyer battle scene, which ripped off “Star Wars.”
They could have really do something REALLY awesome and AMAZING to bring Tron into the 21st century, but they didn’t.
If I were in charge of Disney, I’d fire the entire writing staff, and Kosinski, but still make a sequel. Why not? The primary reason why Legacy lost money was because of the INSANE marketing budget.
Okay, now that everyone in the whole world remembers Tron, Disney won’t need to spend $170 million on marketing for “Tron 3,” and might be able to make a profit.
So, this means Disney will go 3-for-3 in that the sequel will repeat the same friggin’ mistakes that made TRON and TRON: LEGACY so bad? Man, fool me twice…
highest grossing first time director of a shit movie. it out grossed all those other really good movies. you should be proud of yourself, Disney, for your steaming pile of Tron.
ha ha…I just TRONNED myself.
In the end; it’s underwhelming and kinda disappointing. CG Bridges was awkward and everything went downhill after they “escape the arena”, but I thought the first 40 minutes were pretty awesome.
Thats exactly how I felt.
The “Look” and “Sound” of Tron is was so unique and cool it basically carried this movie. Not sure if it can again but I am willing to give it another chance.
Sorry to double post but I was so excited for this film, I felt like an huge opportunity to create this amazing world was squandered. The movie had the look, the sound, the potential to be the new Matrix but it just never quite got there. The film only ended up teasing us with neon blue glimpses of what could have been.
Bad script with unexplained half-baked conceits, lazy exposition and muddled philosophical rambling. On top of all that, it was BORING. There’s nary a moment of tension once Sam breaks out of the video game arena.
The world of the Grid starts off strong with strange geometry and alien ships. Likewise for the programs, their voices are vocoded, aural stuttering and visual artifacting — which is promptly and unexplainably dropped afterwards?! And the Alien world is portrayed thereafter as nothing more than neon-lit city. The end of the movie devolves into a third rate “Attack of the Clones” and Star Wars shuttle sequence.
And do we really need the numerous “There I am” stand-in moments for the more stupid and pathetic members of the audience?
The detractors are hilarious in this comment stream. I’m not sure where you’re getting the disaster numbers you’re spouting, but the figures don’t lie. You just love to hate The Mouse for the sake of hating The Mouse.
Disney is well aware of their true failings, and they get swiftly buried (Haunted Mansion, Tower of Terror, Mars Needs Moms). The fact is, the global take evened out Tron, put the project In the black, and set the stage for more.
Kids will get a Disney XD animated show to further stir it up. We WILL see at least one more Tron film…bank it.
I am not a big fan of Legacy, although it had its strengths.
However, what Disney is building is an IP, not a couple of movies. The Tron animation that will release in 2012(?) looks incredible – far better than the movie – and some who have seen more than me say it is all that and more.
The animation is part of the transmedia strategy that helped sell Disney on Kosinski, and that is where the money is. After the animations, perhaps the audience for the next movie will be even stronger.
“animationS?” Sure sign of an amateur.
The cartoon tron looks worse than the film. And that was pretty bad.
“For one thing, despite the film’s big budget, Tron: Legacy had the benefit of zero first-dollar box office gross participants.”
I’m not that familiar with box office lingo – what exactly does the above statement mean?
first-dollar gross participant = someone (director, producer) who takes a piece of all the money the studio makes, from the first dollar that comes from the box office. As opposed to a net participant, who only starts to take a piece of the incoming money after the studio “breaks even” (the meaning of this fluctuates).
It means that neither Kosinski or the main actors had a profit participation agreement. If they had, they would get a small percentage of the box-office money in addition to what they were paid upfront.
Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, et al enjoy this profit participation agreement for each new movie they do. As do a few actors like Ben Stiller, Johnny Depp, Robert DeNiro, and Leonardo DiCaprio. If a studio is wary of how a movie will perform, sometimes they’ll waive their profit participation agreement until the studio makes its money back.
It means that a star didn’t get to essentially rape and pillage the movie by getting 10% (or more) of the gross box office receipts. Jeff Bridges could have demanded first dollar gross, but he didn’t because he’s a good guy and was more than likely just interested in actually making a Tron sequel because it was a cool idea, instead of just doing it for the dollars.
same. and i completely agree with “elvis lives” up there. I’m so glad Mike Fleming is writing these articles as of late. really moves Deadline down the right path of great journalism.
Essentially the studio didn’t have to pay anyone gross points.
no big stars who get profit participation (save Jeff Bridges–on top of the VERY hefty fee they had to pay him to clear his calendar for the reshoots very late in the game–reshoots that made an almost unreleasable film barely passable).
Tron has always had some weird cult-like overtones to it. Same with The Matrix the real hardcore fans of both franchises practically worship the movies as if the movies were their techno-religion. Too much like Scientology for me. Blech.
I would say, it’s generally true, that if you have to debate it, it probably didn’t make much money.
We’ll probably never know the exact numbers, but these things are true:
It is not a beloved film. There may be some fans who liked it, but it certainly didn’t create a lot of lasting love from general audiences.
It simply wasn’t a very good film.
Rotten tomatoes, 49%
Audience liked it: 68%
compare that to Pirates:
78, 86
narnia, lion witch
76, 62
And you start to see a clearer picture of how the tron sequel will perform. Closer to narnia 2.
Further problematic is the fact that the mythology is just not that solid. Matrix took the best of tron and made sense of the whole, “trapped in a computer netherworld” idea. Tron just doesn’t make sense and is not cool in the same way.
Kinda sad that this is what they’ll focus their energy on at Disney instead of something cool and new.
“Cool and new”? From the studio that’s making a Muppet movie?
Dream on.
hsphar
Google “first dollar gross” and you’ll see.
I don’t feel like being a teacher today.
Essentially, I’m lazy. Thanks to all who answered.
No movie has opened as big as Tron in the last 4 months. It did not have good legs however. Based on the opening it should have performed better. Tron clearly did not play well.
Well, looks like I’ll be the lone voice of dissent.
I LOVED Tron: Legacy. I sometimes think people were expecting wall to wall slam bang action, but if you remember the first Tron, it had moments of action, but was a people piece as well. Tron: Legacy followed suit. I thought they did a great job overall.
More to do with having 28 years to come up with a better script than the first TRON had and not delivering than a lack of action (which Legacy also failed at). It had the music and most of the look (mostly in the disc wars and CG light cycle sequences), but the characters lacked any depth and there was nothing really memorable about the story. And the de-aged Flynn/Clu was badly done.
Make that two voices of dissent. Saw it twice. Had a few issues with it:
*Lightning, thunder and rain in the Grid?
*The whole concept of the Outlands…rocky terrain in the Grid?
*Physics and gravity in the Grid? They played with the no-gravity concept in the game sequence early on, but dropped it.
*No correlation between what was happening in the Grid i.e. inside your PC or Mac with what was happening in the “real world” (so as you’re typing right now there’s an army of programs inside your laptop massing for attack?)
*What would innnovation like cloud computing look like from the inside? No attempt to show it
*No explanation for what happened to Tron between the 1st and 2nd movies a.k.a. why did he sell out to Clu and why did he become loyal again at the end
Wait…I actually talked myself into not liking the movie.
Never mind =)
Visuals were nice, though.
Killer soundtrack!
Shitty film!
Just Redboxed… think I’ll return this DUD early.
hspahr – As I understand it, first-dollar gross participants are people who get a cut of the film’s box office gross as part of their compensation for working on the movie. Writers, producers, and occasionally actors are often given a cut. For Legacy, apparently, there was no one who did.
Jpw: you don’t have any idea what you are talking about. 200M+ negative cost with 150M P&A and the split with theater owners means that with a 400M goss, Tron Legacy is still in the red and will be for a while. While it will ultimately see a profit through DVD/PPV, it will be small and studios aren’t in the business of making 200M films to see a tiny profit.
I’m not a hater — I actually quite liked the film even though it’s not trendy to say so….but the movie is not a financial success.
Don’t spout off about things you don’t understand.
Negative cost = budget + P&A. As in, in this case, $170 million (budget) + $150 million (P&A) = a negative cost of $320 million.
Big studios, like Disney, don’t share 50% of their tentpoles with theater owners, that’s ridiculous. On first weekends the studio will take 80% to 90%. A film, like Tron Legacy, which doesn’t have strong legs and makes a large percentage of its money in the first weekend will actually bring in 60% to 66% for the studio (over the theaters). That means, of the $400 million, Disney probably took in $240 million to $260 million from its theatrical run.
Very few movies, and almost NO tentpoles, actually make its money back from its theatrical run.
Theaters only represent 40% of any film’s revenue. Thus it continues to make money from tie-ins (like video games licences, cds, other merchandising, etc.); DVD sales and rentals; Television and cable sales, etc.
Who exactly are you accusing of “not knowing what they’re talking about” again?