Jeff Bridges and Jared Leto came to San Diego Comic-Con to promote the upcoming “Tron: Ares,” the third film in the sci-fi franchise, and as part of the presentation they treated the Hall H crowd to two clips featuring the iconic light cycles — plus a new music video from composer Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails.
The footage shows Ares (Leto) and Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) chasing Eve (Great Lee) in the film’s first light cycle chase that takes place in the real world. Eve manages to evade them and also manages to steal Athena’s light cycle in the process, much to her amazement.
In another clip, they previewed the immersive world of the grid in another chase sequence involving Ares and Eve trying to escape the grid into the transfer portal.
The final promo clip is the new music video for the film from Nine Inch Nails.
“I am an official Tron superfan. If I wasn’t on the stage, I would be in the audience right now cheering like all these crazy people here,” Leto said at one point. “It was 1982, video games were exploding and films were a huge part of my life when I was a kid. This movie just grabbed hold of me. It grabbed my imagination, and it showed me what was possible in the world. Movies like this really gave me something to dream for and dream about.”
For Leto it was his first appearance in Hall H after nine women accused him of inappropriate conduct in an exposé published by Air Mail.
The third film in the “Tron” franchise, which began way back in 1982, arrives this October, with Jared Leto starring as a program named Ares who finds himself in the real world.
In addition to Leto as Ares, the cast also includes Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Hasan Minhaj, Jodie Turner-Smith, Arturo Castro, Cameron Monaghan, Gillian Anderson and, of course, Bridges as Kevin Flynn, the creator of the computerized world of Tron.
Following in the footsteps of electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos and French duo Daft Punk (nee Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo), the music for “Tron: Ares” will be provided by composers and Nine Inch Nails principals Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Reznor and Ross have provided iconic scores for movies like “The Social Network,” “Soul,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” and, most recently, Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers.”
According to Disney’s official 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.”
“Tron: Ares” arrives in theaters Oct. 10.