People Hate Tron the Way They Hated Disco, And They'll Hate AI, Too
When the crowd and the critics split, it's usually a sign that something bigger is happening.
Nearly everyone loves to hate Tron movies, that is, until they actually sit and watch one of them. Then? Well, then the electric black and neon synthwave lines, futuristic lightcycle battles, and infectious electronic music take over, and people keep watching until it’s over. After which, they sometimes begrudgingly admit that they indeed had fun. That seems to be the case with Tron: Ares, a film with a $180 million budget that didn’t exactly crush its opening weekend with a disappointing $33 million box office haul. That’s significantly less than 2010’s Tron: Legacy, which opened at $44 million.
Lukewarm reviews, an initial sense of Tron weariness from skeptics who had yet to see the film, and the presence of Jared Leto, who in addition to accusations of prior misconduct, has had a string of performances in which he seemed seriously miscast (Morbius, House of Gucci, Suicide Squad) helped to dim the red glow of Tron: Ares’ early box office potential. But a funny thing happened after the film’s debut. Audiences love it. While Rotten Tomatoes critics hung a damning 57% rating on the film, fan reviews were completely disconnected from the cinema intelligentsia, awarding the film a rousing 87% on the movie review site.
That enthusiasm has been reflected on social media, as a wave of movie fans are literally saying, “Ignore the bad reviews,” and telling others to go see it. I agree. The film has its shortcomings, and it takes a massive suspension of disbelief to buy the science and tech in the film, but as an experience, it’s as good as Tron: Legacy, and tells an even better story. I was particularly impressed by Greta Lee’s (The Morning Show, Russian Doll) performance as the film’s co-lead.
This isn’t the first time critics with taste and experience (and perhaps weighted with insider bias) have dramatically diverged from understanding what mainstream audiences want. In 2018, Venom (starring Tom Hardy) was smeared with a horrid 32% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but the fans gave it a resounding 80% approval rating. The disconnect between critics and audiences repeated itself with the sequel in 2021 and the final installment in 2024. Similarly, tentpole film Jurassic World: Dominion scored a horrific 29% from critics, while fans gave the film a very healthy 77%.
Neon Sins and Synthesizer Crimes
So what happened? Why did critics try to kill Tron: Ares and other fan favorites in the cradle?
I think it’s related to technology, and what appears, at least to some film critics, to be the degradation of craft in favor of digital wizardry. Notice that the films I’ve mentioned all share the same DNA of heavy VFX as their connective tissue. The critics may not realize it, but they appear to be expressing a revulsion to technology-framed films. This reflexive allergy to traditional art, smoothed over by technology, was also apparent in the age of Disco in the mid-1970s and early ‘80s, when Disco was frequently referenced as a kind of punchline to a comment about someone without taste.
Nevertheless, historically, artists like Donna Summer, Nile Rodgers, Gloria Gaynor, and yes, even the Bee Gees (SNL parodies notwithstanding), are viewed as essential to the history of popular music. Even today, Disco refuseniks are still seduced into bobbing their head when certain classics are played. Back then, Disco was often seen as a kind of sin against culture and craft, not because the music was discordant or unpopular, but because no one was “supposed” to like music made with Roland and Linn drum machines. But the audiences won, and Disco undeniably ruled its era, and heavily influenced the pop, rock, and hip-hop that came after it.
This dynamic keeps repeating itself over time. Just about 60 years after we were still becoming accustomed to the magic of mid-1800s photography, moving pictures gained popularity in the early 1910s. Minds and eyes that had only recently accepted that painted portraits were being replaced by photos, were soon forced to grapple with the innovation of photos transformed into motion picture stories. Like the critics of Disco, and today’s critics of special effects-dependent films, the early scholars of stage acting had severe reservations about the rise of movies.
In his 1926 novel “Shoot!” (Si Gira), author Luigi Pirandello used a character called Gubbio, a cinematograph operator, to describe the disdain some held for the emerging art of film.
“[Actors] feel that they…are slaves to this strident machine, which suggests on its knock-kneed tripod a huge spider watching for its prey, a spider that sucks in and absorbs their live reality to render it up an evanescent, momentary appearance, the play of a mechanical illusion in the eyes of the public. And the man who strips them of their reality and offers it as food to the machine; who reduces their bodies to phantoms, who is he? It is I, Gubbio.”
The idea of the aura of authenticity embodied in stage acting being diminished by technology was further explored in Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
“The film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person,” wrote Benjamin. “This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.”
Uncanny Valley of the AI Dolls
I believe this same disconnect between critics who pride themselves on being conversant in the art of taste and curation and mass audiences in search of entertainment will happen again with AI. AI-enhanced films and AI-assisted music will be compartmentalized as vapid and devoid of taste by the arbiters of craft. Like early motion pictures, the golden age of Disco, and current-day VFX movie epics, AI will be subjected to its own lashing in the public square as traditionalists lambast anything created with AI as inauthentic, plastic, and just not meaningful enough.
And to be clear, I support artists who are outraged about their work being used to train AI models without their permission, or even compensation, in most cases, to simply duplicate artist creations. I, too, am a visual artist, filmmaker, and author, who created my work the old-fashioned way and shared it online, with no thought that it would be used to train AI models. But even without commercial startups, generative AI technology is already in the wild via the open source community. In fact, open source is how I first came into contact with AI as a user in 2022.
So even if some (unlikely) sudden legislation outlawed companies from facilitating Gen AI tools, open source software, unregulated and uncontrollable, would still be available to everyone on the planet with an internet connection. But here I’m not discussing the current legal maze of Gen AI and its training provenance. I’m talking about the future after AI has been, inevitably, normalized.
Therefore, as a futurist, I must look forward into what comes next.
The good news is that, based on my research, analysis of the filmmaking industry, and my (current) belief in human tastes, I don’t think AI “actors” will replace humans anytime soon. Rather, I think what we’ll see will be more akin to what James Cameron has done with Avatar, and what Peter Jackson did with Lord of the Rings. AI will be used to more affordably and rapidly support elaborate motion-capture performances of human actors set in AI-generated environments.
This approach simultaneously preserves the human element, or Benjamin’s “aura of authenticity,” while allowing actors to wear different faces, bodies, or perhaps very slightly modified versions of what they really look like, all powered by Gen AI. One major clue that this is where the industry will go lies in Cameron’s current position as a board member of Stability AI, while simultaneously vowing not to replace human actors with AI. He’s obviously planning to integrate AI into his innovative filmmaking palette, just not to replace actors.
Critics have already allowed this kind of tech-powered motion-capture acting into their hallowed halls of approval, heaping awards upon Andy Serkis for his motion-capture performances as Gollum. Likewise, Cameron’s Avatar, which relies heavily upon motion-capture, is almost universally lauded by critics and audiences alike. What difference will it make if those motion-capture effects are produced with traditional VFX or AI? I believe, not much, at least for audiences.
In the realm of wholly AI-generated characters, AI will likely become common in animation in the next decade. And there will certainly be films with AI “actors” that appear to be real in background crowd scenes and in stunt work. But an AI as a lead actor? Hmm… I think it will happen, eventually. But, beyond niche genres like horror and comedy, I’m less certain about how that will go over with audiences.
Interestingly, this all brings me back to Tron: Ares, and its co-lead, Leto. I’ve been rooting for Leto since I first saw him in Fight Club, getting turned into mush by Brad Pitt. But honestly, after all these years, it turns out I’m not a big fan of his work. That’s why I find it stingingly ironic that what I consider to be his best work ever as a lead actor is in a film where he plays a robotic AI program made real. Somehow, that role was perfect for him. Yet it also makes me wonder: if audiences can love an automaton-like performance from a human Leto, could they also love the possible fourth installment in the Tron franchise featuring an actual AI actor? I think we’re beginning to get an answer, and not everyone will be happy about it.