This weekend, we’re getting a rare sequel to Tron. Audiences had to wait nearly three decades to get Tron: Legacy, and another 15 for Tron: Ares, which has stronger connections to the original 1982 film than its direct sequel.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. Tron director Steven Lisberger attempted multiple pitches at Tron sequels, and Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinsky was at one point working on a follow-up called Tron: Ascension, with stars Olivia Wilde and Garrett Hedlund set to reprise their roles. But after big sci-fi flops like John Carter and Tomorrowland, Disney backed off on plans for a third Tron.
Kosinski told Variety that Disney wanted to go with known quantities, like Marvel and Star Wars, the latter of which was acquired in 2012 when the company bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion.
So what changed? Tron: Ares screenwriter Jesse Wigutow tells Polygon that it never would have happened without actor-producer Jared Leto.
“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 says, “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.”
Wigutow describes Tron: Ascension as “a very big sequel to Legacy” that “continued the stories of Sam Flynn and Quorra, and some of the other characters that were introduced in that film and existed from the beginning in 1982.” It was a “multi-narrative” movie with a “massive act three.”
After Disney walked away from the direct sequel to Legacy “came a silent period,” Wigutow says. “Then, I get a call from Jared and his producing partner, Emma [Ludbrook], saying, ‘Hey, we want to breathe this life back into this thing, and we want to do an Ares movie from the ground up. What do you think?’ Out of that came a one-page document: What if this character is the villain, but […] then he has a change. He finds elements of humanity that change his programming and makes him want to live like one of us. And what came out of that is what you see.”
But as some Tron fans have noted in recent years, Leto feels like an unusual fit for the franchise, despite dabbling in genre and nerd fare like 2016’s Suicide Squad and the upcoming Masters of the Universe live-action movie, in which he’ll play Skeletor.
Speaking to Leto at a recent press event for Tron: Ares, I asked him why: “Why did you fight for another Tron movie for nearly 10 years?”
“I believe in the franchise,” Leto says. “I love the films. I’m a super fan. I fell in love with the very first film — saw it in the theater as a young kid. It changed my life, it really showed me creativity and technology in a way I’d never imagined. I loved the story. At the time video games were all the rage, and of course still are, but they were just kind of becoming what they are, so it’s just a special time. I got to discover Jeff Bridges in that movie and became a lifelong fan of his as well.
“For me, Tron is Star Wars. It’s Alien [and] Blade Runner, it’s one of the great science-fiction franchises, and I’m really proud to be a part of it.”
While Tron: Ares skips over much of the lore fleshed out by Tron: Legacy — Sam Flynn and Quorra are absent from the film — Rønning and Leto’s sequel does ultimately make an important nod to it. But if Tron fans want true closure to Legacy’s promise, it might require a lot more help from Leto to make that happen.
