If history has taught us anything, it’s that Tron sequels are never easy. Almost 30 years elapsed between the groundbreaking 1982 original and its 2010 sequel, Tron: Legacy. It then took a shorter, but still significant, 15 years for the third film, Tron: Ares, to be released, but that was never the plan. Many, many things changed over the years, and one of the people who was around for almost all of it was writer Jesse Wigutow.
Wigutow, who also worked on Legacy, was officially hired to write its sequel in 2012. By then, director Joseph Kosinski, as well as multiple writers, had already been working on it for almost three years, starting well before Legacy’s release. Only, that film wasn’t called Tron: Ares. It was called Tron: Ascension, and it would’ve followed the events of the previous film. But soon after, Disney bought Lucasfilm and took over Marvel, and the company no longer saw Tron as a priority.
Five years passed, but Wigutow never gave up hope. He was rewarded in 2017, when the franchise came back to life, this time with newly minted Oscar winner (and Tron megafan) Jared Leto leading the charge, and a mostly refreshed narrative. That was far from the end of the line, but now, eight years later, Tron: Ares is finally here. And what a journey it has been.
This week, io9 spoke with Wigutow over video chat to discuss all of those steps. We talked about how the film has changed from the beginning, why that happened, as well as some spoilery specifics about where the franchise could be going from here. Oh, and he’s also a producer on Daredevil: Born Again, so we talked about that, too.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Germain Lussier, io9: I’ve been following this movie forever, and it looks like you came on board around 2012 when there had already been a few writers. What shape was the movie in at that time, and what were your initial directives?
Jesse Wigutow: Coming out of Legacy, there was an interest in telling a more direct, continued sequel to that story. Carrying those characters forward, carrying that mythology forward into another chapter. And I was there for those conversations and part of that process. At a certain point, for a lot of different reasons, there was a kind of a pivot. And the pivot became, “Let’s take this character who had been a more kind of singular or two-dimensional villain in a different concept and build a movie around him.” And that became Ares.
io9: So when you first came on board what was then called Tron: Ascension, did you kind of start from scratch, or did you kind of look at what other writers had done?
Wigutow: Yeah, I worked on Ascension and had taken the torch from Dave DiGilio, who had a great draft. [He’s a] great writer. But it was a different version of the movie, which again, I did a lot of work on that iteration of it. And then a lot of different things kind of came to pass, more of a corporate decision, I think, than anything else. And then when it became the Ares movie, that was from the ground up.
io9: Right, I know there was a lot of work done on the film in those years before it kind of went away. When that did happen, did you ever think it would come back like this?
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