- calendar_today August 29, 2025
TRON’s Digital Frontier Expands Into Reality With Ares
With less than a week until the annual San Diego Comic-Con kicks off, Disney has a major presentation at the show. As part of the run-up to the event, the studio has released a new trailer for TRON: Ares, the long-gestating follow-up to 2010’s TRON: Legacy. Directed by Joachim Rønning, the film ushers in a new era of the TRON franchise, one that at last leaves the computer-generated world of the Grid behind.
The last time audiences were treated to the neon light grid, gridbots, and lightcycles of TRON, they were following the adventures of Sam Flynn, the son of original TRON hero Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), played in the sequel by Garrett Hedlund. TRON: Legacy saw Sam foil the Grid’s ruthless intelligence program Clu in his bid to connect the Grid to the real world. Sam also allied with Quorra (Olivia Wilde), one of Clu’s chosen to seek him out and delete him, as she, too, was on the run from Clu’s deletion squads.
When Disney initially moved forward with the third TRON installment, the plan was to continue directly from where Legacy had left off. The film was officially greenlit in October 2010, and the pitch was that the film would follow Flynn and Quorra’s continuing adventures. Sam has now taken the reins of his father’s company, ENCOM, and the two must deal with the fallout of his rebellion against Clu. While plans for the film moved along for a few years, in 2015, it was canceled by the studio, reportedly as a direct result of the box office disappointment of Disney’s other big sci-fi project at the time, Tomorrowland.
It seemed the TRON franchise would go the way of The Lizzie McGuire Movie, living on infrequently in animated sequels. But new life was breathed into the property in 2020 when Disney announced the film would be a reboot, but set in the real world rather than the Grid. However, ideas from the original script remained, including the prominent presence of a grid program called Ares, which was featured as a central AI in several earlier iterations of the story. After being delayed by COVID and more recently by Hollywood’s ongoing writers and actors strikes, the film is finally finished and in final post-production and has now been scheduled for release later this year.
The synopsis on Disney’s official site reads: “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.” Jared Leto stars as the eponymous Ares, with Evan Peters as Julian Dillinger and Greta Lee as Eve Kim. In addition, Jodie Turner-Smith, Cameron Monaghan, Sarah Desjardins, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, and Gillian Anderson also appear in the film. Jeff Bridges also makes a return as Kevin Flynn, and the music in the film is by industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails.
Trailer: “He’s Not Here to Serve You”
Disney released the first trailer for TRON: Ares back in April. At the time, the clip offered a brief taste of the return of the TRON universe’s neon colors, digital landscapes, flowing lines, lightcycles, and gridbots, but provided little in the way of story details. The new trailer released this week provides greater insight into the film’s narrative stakes while keeping its palette of vibrant visual effects.
The trailer opens with a very Meta scene from what seems like a keynote address from a tech executive. Actor Evan Peters is on stage as the ambitious tech exec Julian Dillinger; he tells the audience, “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.”
He continues, and with a flick of a switch, it appears his AI Ares program has joined him. “Meet the ultimate soldier,” Dillinger says with a sly smile and a cocky finger gesture. He then goes on to showcase Ares’s abilities. “He’s biblically strong, lightning fast, and supremely intelligent. And if he is struck down on the battlefield…” Dillinger delivers an expletive and then punches Ares in the head, knocking the android out mid-announcement, “…I will simply make you another.”
The sequence establishes Dillinger as a type of techno-capitalist messiah figure with a god complex. He fancies himself as the man in control of the A.I. future and can create or destroy such programs at will.
Or at least, that’s what he seems to think. Because, as the trailer shows, Ares may not be beholden to Dillinger the way he assumes. For while Ares may be his creation, his technology and coding, the program has other ideas. He is on a search of his own, it’s suggested. A program looking for something he can’t even quite explain.
After a quick look at the tech, it’s the reappearance of Flynn in a digitized sequence with the question “A malfunctioning program who wants to live, why is that?” that seems to be teasing an interesting philosophical bent for the film.
Jeff Bridges’ return is a nice touch for fans of the original, while Leto, as an A.I. program breaching into the world of the living, may provide an interesting new take on the same central question that TRON movies have always posed about what it means to be a man, machine, or both. On paper at least, it promises big action and questions.
