Inside TRON: Ares — Jared Leto Stars in AI vs Humanity Story

With San Diego Comic-Con less than a week away, Disney has begun to ramp up excitement for the major showcase that it is planning by releasing a brand new trailer for TRON: Ares, a new installment in the long-running science fiction film franchise. Directed by Joachim Rønning, the new TRON movie will continue the franchise’s long-established story, only now its setting is firmly in the real world.

TRON: Ares takes place within the real world and has nothing to do with the franchise’s titular virtual digital realm known as the Grid. The Grid last made an appearance in 2010’s TRON: Legacy, which followed Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), the son of TRON hero Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges). Sam manages to stop a digital program known as Clu from merging the Grid with the real world and ending the real world as they know it. Sam also escapes with the help of Quorra (Olivia Wilde), a unique isomorphic algorithm, or ISO as they’re known in the film, who was being targeted for deletion by Clu.

Disney originally set out to have a third TRON movie take place right after the events of Legacy. The film was officially given a green light by Disney back in October 2010 and was expected to see Sam and Quorra exploring the Grid. Sam would also be taking over his father’s company, ENCOM, in this installment. But for years, the sequel faced multiple delays. In 2015, the sequel was officially canceled. The report stated that Disney’s decision was due to another of its recent science fiction film failures: Tomorrowland.

In 2020, the studio greenlit a new iteration of the film, this time a reboot rather than a direct sequel to Legacy. However, some of the concepts from earlier scripts still made their way into the film, including Ares, a core AI construct that was included in previous script drafts. After a COVID delay and a hiatus during Hollywood’s most recent WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, TRON: Ares is now finished and has a confirmed release for later this year.

According to a Disney synopsis: “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 in the lead role as Ares. The film also stars Evan Peters as Julian Dillinger and Greta Lee as Eve Kim. Joining them in the cast are Jodie Turner-Smith, Cameron Monaghan, Sarah Desjardins, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, and Gillian Anderson. Jeff Bridges will also return to reprise his role as Kevin Flynn. As for the soundtrack, TRON: Ares will feature an original score by industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails.

TRON: Ares New Trailer Is Introduced as the “Ultimate Soldier”

TRON: Ares debuted its first trailer back in April to rave reviews from audiences, although it was light on plot details. While the film’s aesthetics were more than enough to thrill fans, the visuals did little to clue them into the plot or characters. In this new trailer that Disney has dropped ahead of Comic-Con, however, the company offers more than just the standard eye candy.

As the trailer begins, the setting is firmly set in the real world, as one can see that it is more of a real-life setting than the digital world featured in previous TRON films. The beginning of the trailer has Julian Dillinger, played by Evan Peters, speaking at what can only be described as a tech industry conference. In this speech, Dillinger proclaims: “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.”

After making his speech, Dillinger introduces to the world his own “ultimate soldier,” Ares. In what is a stroke of arrogant hubris, Dillinger boasts to his audience, “He’s biblically strong, lightning fast, and supremely intelligent. And if he is struck down on the battlefield…” Before Dillinger can finish his line, he has Ares take a hard fall in the middle of his presentation before proclaiming, “…I will simply make you another.” Dillinger is most certainly a corporate overlord, one who is a driving force in Ares’s existence and who has a vision for AIs in the real world.

However, things may not be as Dillinger expects. Ares’s actions in the trailer tell us that he was not created for just Dillinger’s vision, but rather has his quest to find something he cannot even define himself. This gives a much more philosophical overtone to the film, one which is put into more emphasis when Kevin Flynn is seen in the digital realm to ask, “A malfunctioning program who wants to live, why is that?”

Longtime fans of the original TRON movie will be happy to see Bridges’ return as Flynn, while new layers will be added to the series’ age-old questions of man versus machine as Leto’s character crosses the line into the real world as an AI.

Director Rønning has already proven in the trailer that TRON: Ares will continue to keep with the franchise’s visual flair of neon digital lines, lightcycles, and high definition digital worlds while also blending it with more high-fidelity real-world locales. When combined with a Nine Inch Nails original score, the film has a lot to offer in terms of visual and audio stimuli for the fans while also propelling the series into new territory.

Fans of the TRON franchise do not have to wait much longer, as the film has been given a fall release date. TRON: Ares will hit theaters on October 10, 2025.