Disney Brings TRON Back to Life With Ares This Fall

San Diego Comic-Con is just days away, and one of the biggest presentations at the show will be by Disney itself. The House of Mouse is ramping up for the extravaganza, releasing new footage from its upcoming slate. One of the most high-profile releases is the newest TRON film, Ares, for which a new trailer is now live.

The new Ares movie will be a reboot of sorts for the legendary sci-fi franchise, departing from the TRON franchise’s origins in the digital realm. Directed by Joachim Rønning, the film is the latest in the franchise to put more emphasis on the “real world.”

The last time viewers stepped onto the Grid was for 2010’s TRON: Legacy. The first prequel/spinoff to Disney’s classic 1982 TRON film followed the son of the original’s protagonist (Kevin Flynn, Jeff Bridges), Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), as he discovered the Grid after a generation. Sam stopped the nefarious Grid program Clu (James Frain) from merging the digital world with the real world in the film’s third act and escaped the Grid with Quorra (Olivia Wilde), an ISO (isomorphic algorithm), a type of digitized human that can move freely in both the digital world and the real one. Clu was hunting her down for deletion, but was saved in the end by Flynn.

Disney had initial plans to jump right into a third TRON movie from where Legacy left off. It greenlit a third film in October 2010, with the film to have continued Sam and Quorra’s story and Sam now running his father’s old tech company ENCOM. But despite being on Disney’s radar for years, development struggled. By 2015, the company had killed the TRON 3 film in development, in part because of how similar another sci-fi production in Tomorrowland was. Disney reported being put off by Tomorrowland’s flopped box office showing, a move that put a damper on any real interest in the TRON 3 film that was in the works.

But the TRON franchise did return. A reboot was greenlit in 2020 that would no longer be a direct continuation of Legacy, but a standalone reimagining of the series. Elements from old TRON 3 scripts reportedly made it in, including Ares, a huge AI program that appears in those works. It’s been a long road to the finished product, with the film coming in on the tail end of the pandemic’s cinema shutdown and subject to the film industry’s current strikes and walkouts by Hollywood workers. But with all of that in the rearview, TRON: Ares has wrapped production and will be headed to theaters for a fall release.

The official synopsis from Disney: “TRON: Ares follows a highly sophisticated Program, Ares, who is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission, marking humankind’s first encounter with A.I. beings.” The film stars Jared Leto as the titular Ares. Leto is joined by Evan Peters as Julian Dillinger and Greta Lee as Eve Kim. Jodie Turner-Smith, Cameron Monaghan, Sarah Desjardins, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, and Gillian Anderson also star in the film. Bridges also returns as Kevin Flynn, and Nine Inch Nails composed the score.

Highlights from TRON: Ares Trailer: Jared Leto is the “Ultimate Soldier”

A first trailer was released in April, and while it gave fans the eye candy they’re used to from TRON, it did not say much about the story. The new trailer, just released this week, maintains the high production values and gorgeously bright neon that anyone who has seen a TRON film is used to, but it does say a bit more about the movie’s premise.

It opens in a scene that is more than likely from the original film, in a tech industry keynote-style address. Julian Dillinger is speaking in front of an audience, professing, “So much talk of AI and big tech today. Virtual worlds, what are they going to look like? When will we get there? Well, folks. We’re not going there. They are coming here.”

Dillinger then pulls the curtains to reveal his creation, Ares, a “program built for war.” Dillinger speaks with God-like assurance and a heavy dose of ego, telling his audience, “He’s biblically strong, lightning fast, and supremely intelligent. And if he is struck down on the battlefield…” Dillinger slams Ares to the ground while finishing his sentence, “…I will simply make you another.” Dillinger is a brash and arrogant corporate tech leader who is acting like he has the future of AI technology at his fingertips.

This will likely not be the case for long, however. Dillinger may think Ares is his to control and order about, but the AI is doing his own thing, it would seem, on his quest for an unknown something. It will be fascinating to see how the film delves into this philosophical mystery when Kevin Flynn is also introduced in the digital realm, exclaiming, “A malfunctioning program who wants to live, why is that?”

Bridges’ return as Flynn is the nostalgic bait for TRON veterans, and the introduction of Leto as a rogue A.I. in our world will likely throw a twist on some of the franchise’s more age-old notions about what it means to be human and what it means to be a machine.

It has been a long time coming, but TRON: Ares is finally on the horizon. A release date has also been set, with the film hitting theaters on October 10, 2025.