For a sequel to a 26-year old film that is still technically in development, there certainly was a brief flurry of activity surrounding Tr2n the last 24 hours, with two different stories breaking on the project.

Following the unveiling of a teaser trailer this past summer at the San Diego ComicsCon for the project, news about the followup to 1982′s groundbreaking film Tron has been scarce. But now, in an interview that ran last week which everyone seems to have just discovered, Tron star Jeff Bridges told London’s The Guardian of his hopes for the upcoming project-

[TRON 2 is] another unique, wild experience that was too good to turn down. Engaging in that world again feels just like it did all that time ago. Basically, I’m still a child, I love being childlike, and here was another chance to play with these crazy toys. And the cutting-edge technology makes it exciting. Doing the teaser trailer for Comic-Con, I had my first experience of motion capture. And that’s turning the industry on its head. It’s amazing being part of that… When we made Tron there was no internet, no cellphones. But now we have motion capture, so I think we’ll get a far more successful version of the story, which is someone literally getting sucked into a video game. When we did King Kong in the 70s, one minute you’d have a shot of Rick Baker in this big suit and then you’d cut to this 80ft stiff model, and they looked nothing alike. Compare to that Peter Jackson’s King Kong the technology is there and they did a wonderful job. I thought they created a beautiful Kong. So I hope that’ll be the same for Tron.

Meanwhile, AintItCoolNews‘ Beaks had an encounter with Tr2n‘s director Joseph Kosinski this weekend, who passed on a few details about the film. To bullet point them-

• The ComicCon teaser was shot in stereoscopic 3D as will the film be.
• Tron’s writer/director creator Steven Lisberger is involved with the film on a consultancy level.
• Michael Wilkinson, fresh off of Watchmen, is officially joining the production this week as costume designer.
• Shooting the film will be a “twenty-four month process” and Kosinski hopes to have the end result in theaters by the end of 2010.

Well, if Kosinski plans on the film to take a solid two years to make but wants to get it in theaters by the end of 2010, production better ramp up to high gear relatively soon. I’m intrigued to see what they have in mind in this revisit to the world inside our computers.

Last week, Disney surprisingly shocked the crowd at the San Diego Comic Con with a three minute teaser trailer for a sequel to the 1982 cult favorite TRON. (By the way, Disney, you really need to get that online…)

While it had been known that TRON‘s original writer/director Steve Lisberger had been hard at work developing a sequel for the past few years, it was not known that they had actually put together some test footage, even to the point of calling back star Jeff Bridges.

Now, one of the best sources for news out of Disney, Jim Hill Media, has an interesting piece with more information on the project. Disney is pushing to get this film in theaters for Summer 2010, with Pixar’s own John Lasseter being the driving force in getting it done. To the end, Lasseter has let Lisberger go  from the project, and has brought in veteran commercial director Joseph Kosinski to helm the picture and Lost scribes Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz to draft a new screenplay from scratch.

Lasseter is a pretty sound guy when it comes to story and making a good, if not great, film, so it would be pretty presumptious to think he was making a mistake in removing Lisberger from the film. But on the other hand, this is the guy who created the world within a computer, presaging the idea of cyberspace. Although he’ll still retain a co-producer credit, I can’t help but wonder if Lisberger’s absence will ultimately lead to an absence of what made the original film special.

Hot on the heels of last week’s announcement that Steve Lisberger – the director of the 1982 ground breaking film TRON – was going to be returning to the director’s chair for the first time in nearly 20 years, the Hollywood Reporter is saying that Lisberger’s on-again/off-again sequel to the cult classic appears now to be on again.

Commercial director Joseph Kosinski is reportedly in final negotiations with the Disney to develop and direct the as yet untitled TRON sequel. Kosinski will work with screenwriters Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, who have contributed to the television series Lost, on developing the sequel’s storyline. In the original film, a computer programmer (Jeff Bridges) finds himself sucked into a virtual cyberspace world and forced to fight for his life in a series of deadly video games.

In much the same way that Lisberger shot a test reel of one of the original TRON’s action sequences to show Disney executives what the film would look like, Kosinski is reportedly designing a sequence involving the original film’s “light cycles” as a way of demonstrating what his vision for the film will be.

Kosinski has already been announced last month as the most recent director tied to Warner Brothers’ ongoing attempt to remake the 1976 science-fiction cult classic Logan’s Run. The TRON sequel would go into production after Kosinski finishes up work on Logan’s Run.