Three years ago, Walt Disney Productions flung twenty million dollars worth of sludge on the screen and called it a science fiction film. The Black Hole deserved the critical and commercial ignominy which followed, but the film's failure did more than merely embarrass the studio. It catapulted Walt Disney Productions into the dark ages, a bleak period in which film after film has died at the box office, from the good (Night Crossing) to the bad (Condorman) to the ugly (Dragonslayer). Losing streaks are not uncommon in Hollywood; when an overhyped movie is horrendously had, quite some time must pass before an audience will give the filmmakers a second chance. In the case of Walt Disney Productions, negative reaction to their product has been amplified by the public's inordinately high expectations from the studio: They look forward to motion pictures like Fantasia and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, films that exude the spirit of imagination and quality with which the name Walt Disney has always been synonymous.
Fortunately for the studio, the renaissance may well be at hand. And all because of videogames. Walt Disney Productions has once again poured twenty million dollars into a science fiction film, only this one is no cosmic buzzard. It's called Tron and, as director Steven Lisherger describes it, "Everyone's looking for new fantasies in the movies. Outer space has been done to death, they've gone inside the body and under the sea. What we've done in Tron is take videogames and blow them out to the point where they are a reality." […]
