TRON: Ares Drops Electrifying Trailer Before Comic-Con

Days before San Diego Comic-Con, and Disney’s highly anticipated presentation at the event, a new trailer has been released for the highly anticipated TRON: Ares, the latest entry in the long-running sci-fi franchise. Set in the future and set to return to theaters in 2025, TRON: Ares is the next film from TRON: Legacy director Joachim Rønning and will represent the next entry in the franchise to come out of the Grid and into the real world.

TRON: Legacy, also directed by Rønning, was the last film in the TRON franchise to feature the iconic digital world known as the Grid. Released in 2010 and starring a younger version of Kevin Flynn from the first TRON (Jeff Bridges) in the form of his son Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), Legacy would make the second appearance in the franchise for both Flynn and Bridges. Sam Flynn was forced to return to the Grid in Legacy after his father’s disappearance many years earlier. At the film’s conclusion, he prevents the Grid’s master program Clu from merging with the real world and escapes the digital world with Quorra (Olivia Wilde), an isomorphic algorithm (ISO) who had been hunting Quorra for deletion in the real world.

In the wake of Legacy’s conclusion, plans were immediately greenlit to start production on a third TRON film that would have picked up directly from where Legacy left off. Officially, Disney had the green light for the project as early as October 2010, and a release date was set for April of 2013. The plan was to see where Sam and Quorra went next, and how Sam would transition to taking over the leadership of his father’s company, ENCOM. However, development soon stagnated, and by 2015, the planned TRON Legacy sequel was dead in the water with Disney reportedly blaming the aborted follow-up to the 2010 film on Tomorrowland’s box office disappointment.

In 2020, Disney decided to reboot the series as a standalone story and not a direct follow-up to TRON: Legacy, though some elements from previous scripts remained, like the character of Ares, a Program, and a major AI presence in previous iterations of the script. In 2020, the series had a new director in Joachim Rønning, who would replace Kevin Smith, who was at the helm before his departure, and who had the project being tracked for a release in 2022. However, in the years since, the film was no stranger to setbacks. Like so many projects in Hollywood, production was shut down when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and once again when the recent Hollywood strikes impacted production.

The recent release of a new trailer does signal the end is near for production of the film, as, at the time of this writing, TRON: Ares is in post-production and is slated for a release in theaters on October 10, 2025. According to the synopsis from Disney, 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.” Leto, who previously starred in the DC Universe’s own musical superhero drama series on Suicide Squad, is leading the cast of Ares as the titular character. Peters plays Julian Dillinger, while Lee plays Eve Kim, with additional cast members including Jodie Turner-Smith, Cameron Monaghan, Sarah Desjardins, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, and Gillian Anderson. Jeff Bridges will reprise his role as Kevin Flynn, and the film will be scored by Nine Inch Nails.

Trailer Synopsis: Virtual’s Coming to Get You

The first trailer for TRON: Ares was a visual feast and had fans buzzing in April. It was released early in the year and focused more on the spectacle that fans expect from a TRON entry. It was, of course, no stranger to the genre-bending signature TRON style, neon-lined graphics, digital lightcycles, and colorful digital vistas and landscapes, but offered very little in terms of story or premise.

The new trailer released this week maintains those aesthetic strengths while offering a bit more insight into the stakes of the story. It opens with a figure standing at the podium, seemingly presenting at some kind of keynote speech in front of a tech conference. “So much talk of AI and big tech today. Virtual worlds, what are they going to look like, and when will we get there? Well, folks. We’re not going there. They are coming here,” Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) begins.

Dillinger then goes on to present his “ultimate soldier,” an Ares (Jared Leto) whom he claims he has been developing in-house at his company in secret. Demonstrating the AI, Dillinger lets the audience know that, “He’s biblically strong. Lightning fast. Supremely intelligent. And if he is struck down on the battlefield,” at which point Dillinger smashes the android model of Ares with his fist mid-presentation, “I will simply make you another.” Dillinger is making it very clear that he sees himself and his company as in complete control of the present and future of A.I.

However, the trailer alludes to the fact that perhaps Ares is not simply a program of Dillinger’s company at his command, and the movie may not have quite the same slant on who is in control of whom as Dillinger seems to believe. The Ares Program may have been presented, but he has an agenda of his own to discover something that the character cannot quite describe to itself. When Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) himself appears in the virtual world to ask, “A malfunctioning program who wants to live, why is that?”