Despite being a cult franchise if there ever was one, I can see why they decided to try and do another "Tron" movie and even hint at a sequel. Like it or not, Tron was a hugely influential movie on an international scale.
What surprises me with all the comments is that nobody (on these forums of all places) has pointed fingers towards "Reboot" or Kia Asamiya's "Compiler" and "Assembler" series, not to mention "Seriel Experiments Lain". All of which covered a lot of the same material, but in a somewhat more updated fashion. Tron was cool given that you could see everything as analogies, even if it made no sense in the context of actual science fiction and how computers work. Other concepts have managed to go there and write around the idea of anthromorphic computer code.
This is to say nothing for the simple fact that "Virtual Reality" is now part of the popular meta consciousness. This includes ideas like someone's brain being trapped inside a virtual reality construct.
Simply put I think the big failure with the franchise was in doing a sequel, instead of a reboot of sorts where instead of a gun that "digitizes" physical objects, the whole concept could have been made to work with a virtual reality operating system that was being experimented on, and someone being stuck in there due to corperate subterfuge (probably not realizing that the mind is still present).
I'll also be honest in saying that I fail to see why you need to have a human factor involved in such a movie at all, as demonstrated by "Reboot" which itself became a cult classic, surviving for multiple seasons.
It also occurs to me that two of the sources I mention above (I consider Compiler and Assembler as the same basic series, just focused on differant characters) deal with the concept of virtual entities being brought into the real world. "Compiler" being a comedy about Domi-Matrixs from a 2D computer reality invading our world, with a pair of them falling in love with a couple of guys and deciding to defend it instead. Not deep, but the theme is noteworthy, it's pretty much Tron in reverse, with what amounts to the MCP becoming humanity's defender and other systems trying to shut it down. "Seriel Experiment's Lain" suffered from trying to be too deep, but was based heavily on the mystical signifigance of numerology, and how since computers work based on numbers and math they were basically a giant spell. In simple terms a secret society called "The Knights Of The Eastern Calculus" is working to pretty much create and kill god to absorb her powers and hijack reality. To do this they basically wind up creating an aritificial intelligence, manifesting it in real life (as a girl), and then trying to feed it back into the computers and destroy it, leading to a world that hackers could control the reality of by hacking. There is more to it than that, it's believe it or not the simple version (It's Japanese, what can I say?). It's another work that seemed to be heavily inspired by Tron's idea of an "alternate computer world", that again covered similar concepts in a more updated fashion (or at least when it was released).
In short, Tron's sequel suffers for not being able to cover the material as well as works that the original inspired.
