Tron Legacy Viral Event

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From the The Hollywood Insider, we get news on the Tron Legacy viral event. This should be coming to Salt Lake soon, so keep an eye out. For now, here’s what they say about it:

The new “Tron Legacy” trailer doesn’t come until March 5, when it will be seen prior to Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland,” but some lucky people were given an advance look Saturday in select cities around the world.

Diehard fans of the movie (Tronheads? Trononites?) had to look for clues and go an scavenger hunt in cities like Sydney, Berlin, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, then work together via the Internet to piece together what would eventually tell them where the sneak peek would occur.

And they did not leave disappointed.

The trailer starts off on the slow side, building a mystery. Bruce Boxleitner, reprising his role of Alan Gartner, is telling Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) about his missing dad, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges). He had discovered something that was going to change the world two days before he went missing. Now Boxleitner gets a phone call from a phone from Flynn’s Arcade…a line that should be dead! Soon enough, Hedlund, with an appropriate chip on his shoulder from not having a dad in his life, is at the arcade (he gets there by motorbike, speeding down late night streets and jumping his motorbike from the highway to an off-ramp) and…

…before long, he’s in the computer world. Here the trailer’s pace jumps up a notch, giving us a series of quick and very teasing images of the world fans have been waiting to come to since 1982: a massive city, a blocky transportation machine, Olivia Wilde lounging sexily in a glowing suit, gladiator games, more gladiator games with sexy sirens, Bridges with a retinue of underlings, a blink-and-you-missed-him Michael Sheen, maybe a meeting of father and son, and the kicker ending, a lightcycle race with an explosion (the last image eliciting whoops and hollers).

The trailer still feels more on the teaser side than a full blown trailer (but what do you expect from a movie that doesn’t come out until December 17?) but the packed theater in Los Angeles was definitely into it. This was not a surprise since these were the diehard geeks who came dressed in “Tron” or Daft Punk (the band is scoring the music and made music especially for the trailer) T-shirts.

The Los Angeles crowd was treated to a Q & A with director Joseph Kosinksi and original producer Steven Lisberger. The fans were literally jumping out of their seats to ask questions, some putting not one but both hands in the air in their efforts to ask questions.

One asked if actress Cindy Morgan from the first movie was going to be in the movie. Kosinksi said she is not in this movie but it does not mean she is not in the world of “Tron.” (“Ahh,” went the crowd.) How long was the shoot? (70 days.) How did Daft Punk become involved? (Kosinski had an in with the band.) Is there going to be a Tron ride at Disneyland? (“Many things are coming,” said Kosinski.)

Kosinski got in a question of his own, asking if there were any girls in the room. He got huge laughs and a response from over a dozen geek girls.

But just because there was “Tron” love in the room doesn’t mean Kosinski got away scot-free. One fan asked, “Why you? Why now?” worried that the film will turn out to be just another Hollywood retread. Lisberger stepped in, saying, “We should all be glad that this happened, ’cause that was a miracle.”

Saturday’s event builds on Disney’s “Tron” event at last year’s Comic Con, where it held a scavenger hunt leading to a small warehouse where the movie’s Light Cycles were unveiled. It’s interesting to see how the studio, not known for handling genre and geek properties like some of the other studios, is slowly building the awareness for a movie that will be courting those who fondly remember the original and still attract an entire new generation of filmgoers.

So from this we learn some pretty exciting bits of what to expect from the film. Things are shaping up for this to be amazing, and topping that off with a soundtrack composed by Daft Punk places Tron Legacy solidly on my movie radar. Keep reading for more updates on the local viral campaign.