You
know the drill.  A studio makes a big budget movie banking on a
nostalgic name recognition. It attracts a pretty solid cast. The fanboys
and girls start obsessing over it.  And then the rumors kick in.

Reshoots.
Trouble.  The ingenue is terrible. The whole movie sucks! The studio is
trying to save it! It’s no longer watchable, but they’re trying to
salvage what profit they can. 

Tron: Legacy
was the latest film to suffer a stream of ugly rumors.  They were
quieter than the stories that surrounded other films — such as poor Jonah Hex — but they’ve been dogged.  Most of them center on Garret Hedlund’s performance, which was allegedly problematic enough to require extensive reshoots.

Tron: Legacy
held a very early press junket over the weekend, perhaps to combat the
ugly stuff before it spread further, or because December just comes
earlier every year.  Collider pressed director Joseph Kosinski on the reshoots, and the director was quick to acknowledge and dismiss them:

“I
like to call it additional photography because it really was additional
photography. We added about five or six minutes to the movie, most of
it in the first 20 minutes. Most of the shooting was done to set up Sam a
little bit better and to give him a little more context. A couple
scenes were done to bring to the surface some of the themes of the movie
and to show the relationship of Sam and his father a little more
clearly. Some of it was just picking up visual effects plates and
inserts that we just were never able to get when we first shot … All
in all, it just amounts to a couple of minutes over a two-hour film, but
it’s those little details.”

Kosinski goes on to say that
he felt they were “strategic” and “smart” in how they handled this
additional photography because they had already had a finished cut.

Now, those rooting hard for Tron: Legacy can
be assured; those who could care less can undoubtedly see proof of its
doom here.  It definitely “confirms” that the reshoots did center on
Hedlund’s character, though whether it was due to his performance or
just script stuff remains a mystery.  It might be worth remembering that
Hedlund was one of the contenders for Captain America, supposedly because of his excellent Tron: Legacy performance, but possibly just because he was blonde.

Reshoots can be a good thing (as recently seen with Scott Pilgrim vs the World) or a bad thing (Jonah Hex, X-Men Origins: Wolverine), and it’s too far out to predict what they hold for Tron: Legacy.
But it’s a little tidbit to file away for when you finally plunk your
money down in December, and start analyzing it with all of your insider
news and knowledge.