As Tron: Ares stumbles, Disney is set to back away from the Tron saga, and Jared Leto’s blockbuster credentials look fatally damaged. There’s an awful lot of post-mortem work going on at the moment regarding the performance of Tron: Ares, the third and likely final movie in the Tron movie franchise. Headlined by Jared Leto, ... It looks like Tron and Jared Leto’s blockbuster days are over
As Tron: Ares stumbles, Disney is set to back away from the Tron saga, and Jared Leto’s blockbuster credentials look fatally damaged.
There’s an awful lot of post-mortem work going on at the moment regarding the performance of Tron: Ares, the third and likely final movie in the Tron movie franchise. Headlined by Jared Leto, and with a production budget groaning towards $200m, it’s proving to be an expensive misfire for Disney. Last time it gambled hard on reviving big screen Tron, it just about got away with it, with Tron: Legacy. This time? Well, it didn’t.
The bare facts are that the film cost around $180m to make, a sizeable chunk more to promote and distribute, and its opening weekend number was $64m worldwide. Disney’s been in the game long enough to know as well that the critical response and the word of mouth is on the weak side too, so there’s going to be no imminent commercial revival for the film. It’s going to leave a lot of short- to medium-term red ink.
A new report at The Hollywood Reporter has dug into where this leaves things, and you can probably guess.
Jared Leto, in spite of facing significant allegations over his behaviour (which he denies), is said to be the reason the film got made in the first place. His enthusiasm and desire for a new Tron movie, glossing over the fact that his blockbuster movie pulling power is on the weak side (Morbius looms large), was said to be pivotal in persuading Disney to get its chequebook out. Leto was also the front for the global promotional campaign, which must have been quite a moment for the nine women who’ve made allegations against him.
Read more: Tron: Ares review | Keep your pets indoors for the loudest film of 2025
But also, Tron was also something of a niche franchise. Not without its fans, and rightly so. Yet as The Hollywood Reporter notes, ‘you could have had Ryan Gosling, it wasn’t going to work.’ Certainly not at the scale needed it to work.
Can we take a moment here to highly recommend director Joachim Ronning’s previous film, Young Woman And The Sea, which is flat-out brilliant?
The prognosis for both Leto and Tron at blockbuster scale is bleak. Accepting that Leto is about to appear in the upcoming Masters Of The Universe film as Skeletor, he won’t be the lead, and there’s a strong chance he won’t be the front of the promotional push. And as for Tron? Maybe there’s a future where an innovative filmmaker comes up with an intriguing, low-budget take on the franchise in a decade or two’s time. But for the immediate future, Disney won’t be going anywhere near it – something Tron: Ares co-star Evan Peters appeared to predict a few days ago.
TRON: Ares is in cinemas now. Albeit not for much longer, by the looks of it.
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