Tron fans have expressed their displeasure at learning that Jared Leto will star in the upcoming third film in the sci-fi franchise.
Following reports that Disney is moving forward with Tron: Ares, the next installment in the Tron franchise, fans largely took to Twitter to celebrate the long-awaited news. However, some fans were shocked to see that Leto would headline the film, with many wondering how the actor had managed to get cast in yet another beloved franchise. Others were curious as to why Disney wouldn't be interested in bringing back Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski for the threequel, especially after his latest film -- Top Gun: Maverick -- grossed over $1.4 billion at the box office and earned near-unanimous critical acclaim.
Despite being an award-winning actor, Leto has repeatedly angered fandoms with his roles in various genre films, including Suicide Squad as the Joker and Morbius as the title character. However, while fans have seemingly only just now found out about Leto's casting in Tron: Ares, the actor has actually been attached to the threequel since March 2017. Plot details remain scarce at this time, but the film's script by Jesse Wigutow reportedly acts as a sequel to 2010's Tron: Legacy.
A Tron: Legacy Sequel Almost Happened in 2015
After Tron: Legacy grossed $400 million globally, Disney began working on a sequel, with Kosinski back in the director's chair. However, the threequel was later scrapped just months before filming would have begun in May 2015. While star Garrett Hedlund claimed at the time that the box office failure of Tomorrowland led to the threequel's cancellation, Kosinski has recently said that it was actually Disney's purchase of Marvel and Lucasfilm that led to the Mouse House pulling the plug on his version of Tron 3.
"I hadn’t built anything, but I had the whole movie storyboarded and written. I was really excited because it was inverting the idea: It was all that stuff coming into our world, and it was about the blending of the two," Kosinski said in June 2022. "But it was a different Disney by 2015. When I made Tron: Legacy, they didn’t own Marvel; they didn’t own Star Wars. We were the play for fantasy and science fiction."
The first Tron was released in 1982 and starred Jeff Bridges as a computer programmer and video game developer who is transported inside the software world of a mainframe computer called the Grid and must participate in gladiatorial games in hopes of escaping back to the real world. Bridges reprised his role for Tron: Legacy, which added Hedlund and Olivia Wilde to the franchise. It is not yet known if Bridges, Hedlund and Wilde will be back for Tron: Ares.
Disney is eyeing an August start date in Vancouver for Tron: Ares, with Joachim Rønning in talks to direct. No release date has been announced at this time.
Source: Twitter