After rookie director Joseph Kosinski delivered Tron: Legacy, mixed reviews were had but the fact of the matter is that he made a beautiful sensory assault that did what most people expected it to do: entertain. Eyes were on him to see what he would move on to after that and it looked to be an adaptation of his own illustrated novel Oblivion which would have paired him again with Disney.
Only a few weeks after the film was retitled Horizons, Disney has effectively pulled the plug on the project according to Variety. No real reason for the cancellation was cited, but we can speculate on a few things. Kosinski is currently directing the TRON: Uprising animated series for Disney XD so they could be trying to keep Oblivion off his plate until they can gauge interest for TRON 3. Or, they could have just decided that the following synopsis wasn’t “Disney” enough:
Earth, 2015. The Odyssey travels to Mars to assemble and occupy the Red Planet’s first base station. En route, the sudden appearance of a vast White Cube in space interrupts the ship’s voyage – and the crew of the Odyssey is never heard from again. 30 years later, Earth has become an almost unrecognizable, surreal wilderness with the remains of human cities poking through vast black sand dunes and bizarre geological formations. The White Cube, from a long-dead extraterrestrial race, was to find potentially inhabitable worlds and reshape them into suitable environments for the aliens, who now will never come. It now sits high in the planet’s orbit, dominating the sky, attempting to undo the damage it has caused as well as repopulate the Earth with clones of the comatose Odyssey crew. The only clones on the surface remain those stationed in the looming Watchtowers, scattered around the planet. One such Watchtower crewmember, a clone named Jak, witnesses a burning object fall to Earth. It’s an escape pod carrying Julia Kanan, the one lone survivor of the Odyssey before its capture by the Cube, and a love from Jak’s pre-clone past. But as the authorities close in to retake Julia, Jak’s genetic memory of his love for her drives him to decisions he never would have thought possible-and which could lead to disaster for both of them.
Disney had already put some work behind Oblivion so it’s strange they would let it go, but they’ve given Kosinski and publisher Radical Publishing the go-ahead to take the project elsewhere. Expect him to get this passion project pushed through somewhere even though we know now that it won’t be at Disney.
