Tron: Ares
January 4, 2026
4K ULTRA HD BLU-RAY REVIEW:
Street Date 1/6/26;
Disney;
Sci-Fi;
Box Office $73.16 million;
$34.99 DVD, $40.99 Blu-ray, $49.99 UHD BD; $55.99 UHD Steelbook;
Rated ‘PG-13’ for violence/action.
Stars Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Jeff Bridges, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Gillian Anderson, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Cameron Monaghan.
In a perfect world, a third “Tron” film would have already been released about 10 years ago, following up the events of 2010’s Tron: Legacy. The natural story progression would be to explore the concept of digital beings coming into the real world, inverting the premise of the 1982 original Tron.
However, that sequel was scrapped after the box office underperformance of Tomorrowland reportedly made Disney skittish about producing big budget science-fiction movies. But it wasn’t too long after that a third film was back in the works, though most of the cast and creative team had dropped out by that point. The story was reworked to focus on a new character, Ares, who had originated in drafts of the earlier project’s screenplay before its development was abandoned.
Mixing some new concepts with a slew of nostalgic references to the original film, the plot of the finished project involves a tech war between rival corporations over advancements in artificial intelligence, and a sentient program caught in the middle.
Jared Leto plays Ares, a security program for Dillinger Systems, which has developed a method for transferring digital constructs such as soldiers, vehicles and weapons to the real world. However, the structure of the entities destabilizes after 29 minutes and requires something called the Permanence Code to remain viable. So CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), grandson of David Warner’s antagonist character from the original film, sends Ares to infiltrate the mainframe of ENCOM, the company once run by Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) in the earlier films. Learning the new ENCOM CEO, Eve Kim (Greta Lee), has uncovered the Permanence Code, Dillinger sends her into the computer so Ares can extract it from her. However, since doing so would probably kill her, Ares balks and decides to help her escape, hoping to obtain the code for himself to become human.
The task of stopping them falls upon another security program, Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), who brings the chase into the real world using advanced weaponry from the grid, vowing to eliminate any impediment to obtaining the Permanence Code before her 29 minutes runs out and she’s transferred back into the computer grid and the cycle resets. Meanwhile, Julian’s mother (Gillian Anderson) tries to rein him in.
Tron: Ares offers dazzling visual effects and presents some interesting ideas in its re-interpretation of the franchise’s mythology, even if it raises more questions than it answers, the primary hook being the chance to see the digital vehicles from the previous films interact with the real world. Ares pays some lip service to the implications of the previous film, but if its almost total detachment from the story arcs set up in Legacy wasn’t enough to alienate fans, the 15-year hiatus between films didn’t help either, resulting in the film’s underwhelming box office performance. In addition, the very character after whom the franchise is named, Tron himself, played by Bruce Boxleitner in the first two films, is completely absent. That leaves Bridges, popping in for what is essentially a cameo as a digital echo of Flynn (who seemingly died in Legacy) as the only actor to appear in all three films.
The music, by Nine Inch Nails, is also a step down from the previous films, aping the electronic stylings of the Legacy score by Daft Punk and the 1982 music by Wendy Carlos, but (apart from one scene that directly references the original film) lacking the melodic texture of either, veering instead toward a dissonant, industrial sound.
All in all, Ares should provide a bit of interest to “Tron” fans with some of its franchise callbacks, but it won’t stop them from pining over the sequel that never was and wondering what could have been.
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The home entertainment presentation of Tron: Ares includes three short comedic deleted scenes that run two-and-a-half-minutes in total, including a cameo from original “Tron” creator Steven Lisberger.
Also included are five behind-the-scenes featurettes totaling about 35 minutes. The primary making-of featurette is the 12-minute “The Journey to Tron: Ares,” which provides a general look at the various aspects of the production. The seven-minute “Lightcycles on the Loose” delves into how the film updated one of the franchise staples — chase sequences involving motorcycles that emit walls of light behind them — drawing particular inspiration from the speeder-bike chase from Return of the Jedi. The six-minute “The Artistry of Tron: Ares” features Leto (who also served as a producer on the film) and director Joachim Rønning discussing the technical details of the film, while the five-minute “Cast Conversations” offers snippets of insight from the film’s performers as they interview each other — Leto with Bridges, Lee with Turner-Smith, and Peters with Anderson. Finally, there’s the five-minute “The Legacy of Tron,” which explores some of the cameos and references to the other films layered throughout Ares.