[jerf]

Tron is a fantastically difficult franchise to write for. It is, in my opinion, the most alien franchise in Hollywood. It's unusual for alien worlds in Hollywood to have different physics, but the grid does. Its residents are not human, and while some basic connections to humans are necessary for the audience to care at all, the programs on the grid are not humans. Very different motivations, very different needs.

And now that Hollywood executives have all but open contempt for writing, I had no hopes of them writing a decent Tron film. And they didn't. Even Legacy really kind of squeaked out decent quality (if not spectacularly perfect in every way) in an era where the writing was already degrading; I recall not expecting much from that film even then and being pleasantly surprised. Now it's just hopeless to expect them to be able to write something as foreign as the deeply alien grid residents in Tron when Hollywood writers hardly seem to be able to write about anything that isn't just their own personal interpretation of some family trauma they directly experienced, or their previous night's dinner politics conversation translated to screen with some one genre or another's conventions smeared over it like a bad makeup job.

[dustingetz]

what went wrong historically that the writing got so bad these days?

[PaulHoule]

I think there's a bit of a monoculture in L.A. and the same kind of people keep writing the same kind of movies in big committees.

I think a lot of westerners are getting into anime and manga and part of it is that a manga is typically drawn and written by one person who is responsible for the whole story, contrast that to the "Marvel System" where four people worked on each book -- Stan Lee had a writing credit and it's true that he had a special talent for picking the exact words but the art team had a big influence on deciding how the story would go.