‘TRON: Legacy’ Dominates Box Office Sales With $43.6 million

If you wait long enough, it’s not a sequel, it’s the beginning of a whole new franchise. So it is with ‘TRON: Legacy,’ which proved so huge in its first three days that it rendered the original movie 28 years ago a mere footnote in the reboot’s success.

‘TRON: Legacy’ dominated the box office with an estimated $43.6 million, about $17 million more than the 1982 ‘TRON’ earned during its entire run. You’d think a sequel to a movie made nearly 30 years ago and beloved only by a cult of fanboys would face an uphill climb at the box office, but Disney deserves a lot of credit for expertly marketing the sequel, making sure it had state-of-the-art special effects, getting Jeff Bridges to return as the star (and to play opposite a CGI version of his younger self), and getting it into as many 3-D and IMAX theaters as possible.

The Disney release reboots the story line started in Jeff Bridges’ 1982 tale “Tron,” in which his character is hurtled into a deadly virtual reality known as the Grid. The movie co-stars Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde.

Though quaint by today’s standards, the computer-graphic effects in the original “Tron” were cutting-edge at the time. Yet the movie was a box-office underachiever whose following somehow swelled in the intervening decades in a way that perplexed even the studio’s executives.

“I sure wish I knew, because there is a very, very committed core group of people who just love that movie, and they have fanned the opening-weekend grosses,” said Chuck Viane, head of distribution for Disney.

IMAX screens made up more than 25 percent of the movie’s midnight opening take of $3.6 million early Friday, a record ratio for IMAX. Those spectacle surcharges, plus enthusiastic word-of-mouth, should keep the new ‘TRON’ a top moneymaker throughout the holiday season. Not to mention ensuring that Disney doesn’t wait another 28 years before making ‘TRON: Legacy: Legacy.’

The full top 10:
1. ‘TRON: Legacy,’ $43.6 million (3,451 screens), new release
2. ‘Yogi Bear,’ $16.7 million (3,515), new release
3. ‘The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,’ $12.4 million (3,555), $42.8 million total
4. ‘The Fighter,’ $12.2 million (2,503), $12.6 million
5. ‘The Tourist,’ $8.70 million (2,756), $30.8 million
6. ‘Tangled,’ $8.68 million (3,201), $127.8 million total
7. ‘Black Swan,’ $8.3 million (959), $15.7 million
8. ‘How Do You Know,’ $7.6 million (2,483), new release
9. ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I,’ $4.8 million (2,860), $265.5 million
10. ‘Unstoppable,’ $1.8 million (1,874), $77.3 million

In the original ‘TRON’ (1982), video game designer Kevin Flynn (Bridges) got trapped in his own game and had to fight his way out. Years later, he gets stuck there again, this time for decades. By the time his grown son, Sam (Hedlund), finds his way into the system, the network has become a police state run by Clu, a program whose avatar looks like the younger Flynn, who keeps the populace docile with gladiatorial games involving illuminated motorcycles and deadly frisbees