‘Frozen’ Director Wants to Reboot Forgotten Disney Classic

The co-director of Frozen (2013) wants to reboot one of Disney’s best and most forgotten cult classics as a new animated movie.

Jennifer Lee wrote Frozen (and co-directed it with Chris Buck), a female-led fantasy movie loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, featuring the voices of Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, Josh Gad, and Jonathan Groff.

It became one of the biggest Disney franchises ever. The first film grossed over a billion dollars, produced a well-received sequel, numerous short films and specials, numerous video games and board games, and a Broadway musical.

Frozen also received two Academy Awards (and won Disney’s first Best Animated Feature) and is currently ramping up to celebrate its tenth anniversary with a slew of celebrations and honors. Pretty good for Jennifer Lee’s directorial debut.

Lee is not only the first female director of an animated Disney feature film, she is now the Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Animation and thus has a lot of sway in what gets made there.

According to a recent interview with Collider, Jennifer Lee is excited to reboot Tron (1982), the beloved virtual reality science fiction film, as an animated feature.

She confirmed that she was bringing the idea to the creative table, saying, “You know, here’s what you can say back to him, that I will promise to do at my next directors’ lunch. Once a month, I just have lunch with all the directors together, and I’m gonna say, “There has been a request. Is there anyone here, who has been dreaming of that to happen?” We’re filmmaker-driven, so then I can blame them, if it doesn’t happen. No, I’m teasing. Just tell him that I’m gonna write that down and bring that to them. Unfairly, I haven’t done that yet, so I will. I love that.”

Tron was one of Disney’s most ambitious movies of the 1980s, a live-action science fiction adventure that used early CGI along with traditional backlit filmmaking. It was directed by Steven Lisberger (who also co-wrote the story with Bonnie MacBird) and starred Jeff Bridges as a computer programmer transported into a virtual reality world of humanoid software programs.

The film was a moderate success at the time, but CGI visuals would not come into greater visibility for another decade. Still, the film became a cult classic among science fiction aficionados, in large part due to the film’s unique visuals and Jeff Bridges’ performance as a laidback genius in a world of anthropomorphic technology.

Disney attempted to give the franchise a soft reboot with Tron: Legacy (2010), which was a huge box-office hit but did not lead to further sequels. An animated series carried fans for a few years, and Tron: Ares starring Jared Leto, has been in development for years with little forward movement.

However, with the woman from Frozen behind it, it feels a bit more likely that we could actually get a new Tron movie sooner rather than later.

Will the Jared Leto Tron movie ever actually happen? Is an animated feature the way to go? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!