Answering The Christian Science Monitor

Asks the confused reviewers at the CSM: "Why did 'Tron: Legacy' do so well at the box office?"

I recall predicting about this time last year that it would disappoint; if I am proven wrong that will not bother me particularly. An opening weekend of over $44,000,000 is a good start to the movie making back its purported $300,000,000 budget, but it would still have a long way to go before the movie can be called a success in financial terms. There seems little doubt, though, that when merchandising and spinoff video games are factored in to reviving this movie, Disney will be getting lots of Tron dough.

So why did this movie do even this well, mystifying curmudgeonly reviewers who hated the 1982 original film? The answer is that there are a lot of people more or less my age who watched this movie as teenagers (or in my case, as an almost-teenager) who were visually amazed by the video-game-brought-to-life, or rather life-brought-to-video-game, look of the original Tron. Being digitized into a video game was a primal fantasy for kids of the early 1980's and it has remained a primal fantasy for kids ever since.  So that's an entire demographic bracket for whom the movie promises to bring such a primal fantasy to the silver screen. In 3D, for which the audience will pay extra at the box office.

That's why Tron: Legacy did so well at the box office.