Like every other Hollywood studio, Disney has had its fair share of failed attempts at launching franchises (“John Carter,” anyone?). But the trilogy of “Tron” films, released over the span of 43 years, finds itself in a franchise limbo, too successful culturally and financially to be a true bust or be given “cult” status, yet never reaching the peaks of the IP that made Disney a box office tour de force through the last two decades.
This limbo status is evident in the $33.5 million domestic/$60 million global opening of “Tron: Ares” this past weekend, nearly 15 years after Disney first tried to turn the landmark 1982 sci-fi film into a franchise with the legacy sequel “Tron: Legacy,” which grossed $400 million worldwide before inflation.
While helping theaters stave off a slump as bad as the one they endured in the first quarter, this start for “Tron: Ares” is roughly 25% less than the $44 million that “Tron: Legacy” earned from its December 2010 opening slot. And for lead star Jared Leto, this opening is below the $39 million start of the infamous meme magnet “Morbius” in April 2022, a film that grossed $167 million against a reported $100 million budget. “Tron: Ares” has a reported $180 million budget.
With less than a third of the film’s opening weekend coming from under-25 audiences — the demo that was essential to turning films like “Final Destination: Bloodlines” and “Top Gun: Maverick” into successful revivals of decades-old IP — “Tron: Ares” is facing a situation where it will have an uphill battle to get even close to what “Legacy” earned, and without the holiday period that its predecessor had to boost turnout over several weeks.
“It’s hard to peg exactly where the mass appeal for a third ‘Tron’ film was going to come from,” Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock told TheWrap. “It’s not as brainy as the past films and tries to appeal to the multiplex masses, but there just isn’t anything there that immediately tells audiences there’s something they haven’t seen before.”
“Greetings, programs”
The saga of “Tron” has been a rather odd one. First hitting theaters in a summer that also had “E.T.”, “Star Trek II” and “Blade Runner” on the slate, “Tron” only outgrossed the last of those three films with $50 million worldwide. “Blade Runner” had $41.9 million, “Trek” had $97 million, and “E.T.” had a then-all-time record $359 million.
But despite that, “Tron” became not just a cult film, but an influential one. Along with a mix of classic visual effects techniques and a new effect called “backlit animation,” “Tron” wowed industry insiders with some of cinema’s first computer animated sequences, the most famous being the light cycle action scenes animated with black backgrounds to allow it to be rendered with the minimal memory available to computers at the time.
In a 1998 interview, “Toy Story” director John Lassiter credited “Tron” with showing him and Steve Jobs the capability of computers as a storytelling medium, leading to the founding of Pixar. “Tron” lead animator Chris Wedge went on to found Blue Sky Studios and direct the hit film “Ice Age,” which Disney is reviving for a sixth installment in 2027.
Fast forward to the late 2000s, with “Tron” having matured into a cult hit and Disney in search of new live-action franchises to develop alongside the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series. Film producer Sean Bailey and director Joseph Kosinski worked together to bring “Tron” into the 21st century, but had disagreements over what that would look like. Bailey agreed to finance a proof-of-concept video to allow Kosinski to present his vision.
That concept video, which premiered to a surprised and awestruck crowd at San Diego Comic-Con in 2008, became the basis for the first teaser trailer for 2010’s “Tron: Legacy,” which was also one of the first films released by Disney after Bailey became its president of live-action production.
The teaser instantly struck a chord. Gen X “Tron” devotees were wowed by the updated look and the return of lead star Jeff Bridges, while teen and college-age millennials were drawn by the sleek black-and-neon aesthetic regardless of whether they had seen “Tron,” not to mention the soundtrack by Daft Punk.
But once again, the critics consensus was the same for “Tron: Legacy” as its predecessor: looks cool, but the story is lacking. Still, “Legacy” had the advantage of coming out at the peak of the 3D bonanza that gripped theaters thanks to “Avatar” the year before; and while it didn’t draw audiences worldwide like James Cameron’s epic did, its promise of a dark, but family-friendly form of edgy escapism was enough to make it a solid hit with $400 million grossed worldwide.
In the five years that followed, Disney explored using “Legacy” as the platform to launch “Tron” into a major part of its IP stable, as evidenced by the animated series “Tron: Uprising.” But in 2012, Marvel and Lucasfilm arrived in Disney’s portfolio, which combined with Bailey’s fledgling remake series with movies like “Alice In Wonderland” and “Cinderella” gave Disney all the live-action franchises it needed.
Meanwhile, a third “Tron” film featuring “Legacy” leads Garret Hedlund and Olivia Wilde slowly fell apart until it was reported in May 2015 that Disney was abandoning the project. In a 2018 interview with “Happy Sad Confused,” Hedlund suggested that Disney dropped the project in part because another one of their sci-fi films, “Tomorrowland,” struggled at the box office, barely crossing $200 million worldwide against its tentpole budget.
Arrival of ‘Ares’
That didn’t mean that “Tron” and its light cycles were completely mothballed. In 2016, a year after the “Legacy” sequel was shuttered for good, Disney opened its new theme park in Shanghai and with it, a new ride based on the 2010 film. Now parkgoers could ride on light cycles themselves while Daft Punk’s pounding electronic soundtrack blared in the background.
Meanwhile, it was reported in 2017 that Jared Leto was circling a new “Tron 3” project around a brand new program from the Grid called Ares, a project that would eventually become the film from “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” director Joachim Rønning that was released this past Friday.
In an interview with Polygon, “Tron: Ares” screenwriter Jesse Wigutow credited Leto with pushing hard to see the project through to completion as both lead star and producer. Leto has spoken about how he has been a lifelong “Tron” fan ever since seeing the original film as a kid, and “Ares” was his chance to jump on a light cycle of his own.
“The first iteration of [Tron: Ares] was a different movie, but it had a character named Ares that [Leto] was cast as while we were in pre-production,” Wigutow told Polygon, “He really got his teeth into this character and really wanted to hold onto it, and ultimately came to me and said, ‘Let’s just build a movie around this character. I want to understand this character, his origins, and I want to take him to a very different place.’ So that’s really the provenance and the origin of this specific film is Jared’s dogged persistence on getting it done, but also telling the story of this character specifically.”
Disney has given “Tron: Ares” a full marketing push, particularly marketing the soundtrack from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross via their industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails. Leto was prominently featured in promotional material along with shots of light cycles and other ships from The Grid invading the real world. The theme parks got onboard as a version of the “Tron” Shanghai ride opened at Epcot in Orlando featured an “Ares”-themed overlay to promote the film.
But on its opening weekend, “Ares” stalled out quickly. For the third time, critics’ positive notes only extended to the visuals and soundtrack and nothing else. And while audience reception seems to be as positive as it was for “Legacy,” only 30% of the opening weekend audience came from moviegoers under 25, suggesting that it is millennials and Gen Xers who saw the previous two films who were carrying the load for this opening weekend.
While Leto may have been the champion for bringing “Tron” back to theaters, Bock sees “Ares’s” failure to even match the opening of “Morbius” as a sign that, nine years removed from “Suicide Squad,” the 53-year-old actor has reached his limit as a draw.
“If you’re selling this film to an older generation more familiar with ‘Tron,’ yeah, there might be some appeal. But where is the younger lead to try to bring in a younger generation?” he said.
End of Line
Last year, Bailey, the producer who was key to making “Tron” more than just a deep cut of 80s pop culture, stepped down as Disney’s production president, closing the book on a 14-year run at the studio. “Tron: Ares” is one of his last contributions, and he is credited at the start of the movie with a title card reading “A Sean Bailey Film.”
Such a changing of the guard often comes with a new approach to what films get greenlit, and what comes from Disney under Bailey’s successor, David Greenbaum, remains to be seen.
The studio’s 2026 slate has a couple of non-IP offerings from 20th Century Studios like the Josh Brolin survival thriller “Whalefall,” but is largely defined by titles like “Toy Story 5,” a live-action “Moana” remake first greenlit by Bailey, and Marvel’s “Avengers: Doomsday.” Disney does have placeholder release slots in the spring and fall of 2027 that could be used for live-action projects released under the Walt Disney Pictures label.
But for now, “Tron” seems to be finished at least in terms of film and TV production, though it will endure at Disney’s parks and potentially in other forms of media. While it never became a “Pirates of the Caribbean”-level hit for Disney, the studio’s attemot to revive the franchise with multiple projects did introduce the world of Space Paranoids and The Grid to new generations who had their own dreams of jousting on light cycles and slinging data disks against evil computer programs.
“‘Tron’ did have a lot of influence on sci-fi and pop culture, and there’s something to say about that,” Bock said. “It was a world that a lot of people wanted to be a part of. Jared Leto certainly did.”
