Tron: Ares Writer’s Star Wars Comparison Exposes the Franchise’s Biggest Problem

Tron is finally booting back up. After 15 years of silence, Tron: Ares is not just picking up the franchise where Legacy left off, it is basically a soft reboot designed to get new people in the door without abandoning the diehards. And if you are wondering why it took this long, the writer says the answer is equal parts tech whiplash, timing, and a reality check about how big Tron actually is in the culture.

• Title: Tron: Ares
• Director: Joachim Ronning
• Cast: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Gillian Anderson
• Runtime: 1h 59m
• Release: October 10, 2025
• Premise: Near-future story that moves the Grid into the real world. Jared Leto plays Ares and Jodie Turner-Smith plays Athena, AI programs built as digital soldiers who cross over into reality, where things do not go as planned.

Tron is not Star Wars, and the movie knows it

Writer Jesse Wigutow told IGN he is under no illusion about where Tron sits on the pop-culture food chain. There is a legit, vocal fanbase that loves the mythology from Tron: Legacy, but the average moviegoer is not attached to Sam Flynn the way they are to, say, a Skywalker. That is why Ares leans hard into what people instantly recognize as Tron — the razor-clean neon look, Lightcycles, the slick digital design — and builds a new, timely hook around it rather than relying on nostalgia alone.

Why the 15-year wait

Right after Legacy in 2010, Disney initially aimed this as a straightforward sequel. Then the world changed faster than the outline did. As Wigutow puts it, the team spent years chasing real technology that kept outrunning their future-fiction ideas, and the project kept shifting to stay relevant. What started as a far-future concept drifted closer and closer to right-now sci-fi.

'We began thinking decades ahead, and over time it started to feel more like three minutes into the future.'

Inside baseball alert: at one point, Disney even kicked around the idea of using what was pitched as the first 'AI actress' on screen, then backed off after 'protocol' concerns were raised. That should tell you how much the conversation around AI evolved while this thing was in development.

The AI of it all

When development started after Legacy, AI was still mostly a lab premise, not an everyday headline. Now it is everywhere, which is exactly why Ares pushes the Grid into the real world and centers the story on AI entities trying to exist outside their sandbox. Wigutow says that shift should make the movie feel more immediate and grounded, even as it goes full Tron with the imagery.

So what is actually different this time

Ares flips the usual Tron setup. Instead of humans trapped inside the digital world, it is the programs crossing into ours. The movie is still a sequel, but it is also a soft reboot built to stand on its own, with that unmistakable Tron glow intact. Wigutow also promises what he calls serious audiovisual excitement — basically, a fast, flashy ride with tech that looks a step beyond what we have seen before.

The bottom line

Tron: Ares is designed for 2025, not 1982 or 2010. It respects the legacy, but it is not banking on it. Expect the signature neon and Lightcycles, most of the action outside the Grid, and an AI story that mirrors the world we are actually living in now. It hits theaters October 10, 2025.