They're Actually Making a Tron 2

My fascination with Tron hit an all time high in college, mainly because only one video store had a copy of the film, and to rent it required a $500.00 deposit. Surely, any VHS that required a $500.00 was good. Damn good. No, TRON good. The 1982 classic is and always will be a legend.

And, like all legends before and since -- Indiana Jones, Star Wars, The Phantom of the Opera -- it will be ruined by a sequel. I haven't seen a preview, but I know this to be true. I know it because it fits the classic mold of a horrible sequel: it was made more than two decades after the original came out.

Mathematically the formula for a horrible sequel would look like this:

20 years + original movie release date = horrible sequel

This sample can be applied to literally any sequel. Take the Bible. The Old Testament had plagues, explosions, harems, a vengeful god--it's the Jerry Bruckheimer of religious texts. Then, 20+ years later the New Testament comes around. The New Testament is like a foreign film: there's a lot of confusing parables, I don't understand the ending, and it's rife with homoerotic undertones (monogamous guy hangs out with twelve all-male 'disciples', he's a 'fisher of men', at the last supper Jesus asks a table full of guys to eat him).

What bothers me more about sequels is that there are plenty of writer types out there who have written plenty of screenplays with plenty of original plots. They're like those shows that you know were only supposed to last one season, but then they just keep going. And going. Until they ruin everything that was good about it. I'm talking about you Heroes.

The fact is, there's an art to bowing out gracefully. That's why there's no Mona Lisa: the Sequel. That's why there isn't a follow-up to Citizen Kane. It's why Iraq was a shitty follow up to Afghanistan.

But as the sequel generation grows up, I hope we've learned that originality is worth the $500.00 deposit, and it's something we should shoot for.