TRON's Legacy of Music: Then and Now
Did Tron Ares deserve the soundtrack it has?
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There are not many people who would consider TRON: Ares’s $33 million opening weekend a success, despite the fact that it is the number one movie of the weekend. Made for $180 million (and, assuming the standard operating procedure of spending relatively equal the production budget on marketing), Disney is in the hole many hundreds of millions on this picture and the cultural zeitgeist has declared it a failure. So, now we all have to chatter:
What happened?
This IP’s last iteration, 2010’s TRON: Legacy, opened at $44 million on a budget of $170 million. That was an expensive picture that opened just a bit higher than Ares and went on to make over $400 million worldwide. Released around Christmas 2010, it stayed in theaters until the end of February the next year. Of course, only movies that are on track to make billions stay in theaters for longer than four weeks in 2025 so chances are TRON: Ares will be streaming on Disney+ in time for this year’s holiday season.
The speculation mills about IP crises and what caused them are running wild over on social media, with science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders quoted above. She thinks the answer is obvious: TRON isn’t a popular franchise, and there’s no reason to suspect that another TRON movie would ever have been a success.
I, uh, personally don’t see that as the case.
This new TRON just didn’t seem to hook on why the previous two TRONs were popular amongst audiences, and the secret to TRON’s legacy is actually one thing: Electronic music. The original 1982 movie has one of the most groundbreaking musical scores of all time.
Wendy Carlos had already broken people’s brains with her album Switched On Bach, and then she figured out how to apply synthesizer technology to work as on a film score with A Clockwork Orange. Hiring her to do the TRON score was perfect kismet and I can’t personally think of anyone else who could have done the music for a film so ahead of its time.
In 2010, in a move that may have been a little gimmicky, Disney hired noted French electronic dance music pioneers Daft Punk to compose Legacy’s score and also put on a concert in the middle of the film, integrated into the central narrative (as much as it could be).
This year’s TRON score was composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails. Also electronic musicians in their own right. This is the duo’s third movie to be released in 2025 and not that I hold the murmurings of the anonymous Reddit poster to be gospel, but the subreddit r/movies has nothing but lackluster reviews for Reznor/Ross/NIN’s efforts on this score. Not quite a NIN record and not quite score, I will say that the overall effect of the released album, to me, feels like something from the mid ‘90s, when NIN was at its zenith as a band.
Legacy’s Daft Punk score came at a time when the band was supremely hot; their Alive tour from 2006-2007 was credited with bringing electronic dance music to the masses. The duo’s involvement in Legacy was announced at the 2009 Comic Con in San Diego; the same Con where Robert Downey, Jr. hocked Iron Man 2, and most of the convention was in the throes of Twilight: New Moon.
This was the beginning of ComicCon’s relevancy to the world of pop culture at large, and the new world of social media virality among the key youth demographic was important to the ascendancy of genre films. Daft Punk performing in front of a light-up pyramid at Coachella in 2006 was a moment many fans wished they could have experienced and only knew about because of the advent of phones that could record and then upload video to this fancy little website called YouTube which had only started the year before, in 2005. Legacy promised fans still in a FOMO hangover the opportunity to attend a two-hour (and air conditioned!) Daft Punk concert, with a dash of Jeff Bridges on the side.
Nine Inch Nails is popular. Do not get me wrong. They are currently touring and perhaps that’s why people are not flooding the theaters for an exclusive taste of music from their favorite band. Also, since the beginning of 2020, Reznor and/or Ross have brought their sound to (I am not kidding you) 26 different filmed projects combined. That is a lot of Nine Inch Nails. Some might say… too much.
Wendy Carlos’s TRON soundtrack is credited with literally changing the way people listen to music. Daft Punk’s TRON: Legacy soundtrack defined an era of film music, for a key and vocal marketing demographic. NIN’s TRON: Ares soundtrack sounds like, well, the same kind of music NIN has been making for 25 years. For a group of people who are old enough to remember buying Pretty Hate Machine at their local mall.
I can’t help but think that if Disney had hired a relatively young and up-and-coming EDM band or electronic composer, the results may have been slightly different. TRON is a film series about the future that fully immerses you in the feeling of being inside a computer. And I want to be inside of a computer of the future– not one running Windows 2000.
Are you a Tron fan? Have you seen Tron: Ares? Drop your thoughts on the various soundtracks in the comments.
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