“Tron: Ares” blew the roof off of San Diego Comic-Con at its panel on Friday evening, with an eye-popping, ear-blasting laser-light show set to the pulsing original score by Nine Inch Nails. The panel also included two extended clips from the film, and ended with a NIN music video of the original song “As Alive as You Need Me to Be.”
The movie is third film in one of the more improbable movie franchises in modern Hollywood, which Disney tacitly acknowledged with how it opened its panel, with an extended trailer that covered the events of the previous two films. The first, 1982’s “Tron,” stars Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn, a computer programmer who gets sucked into the computer mainframe know as the Grid. The movie is best known for its groundbreaking use of computer generated imagery for its visual effects, to capture a purely digital world. But “Tron” was far from a blockbuster, grossing roughly $50 million worldwide (unadjusted). The sequel, “Tron: Legacy,” debuted 28 years later, starring Bridges in dual roles as Flynn as an older man and his de-aged digital doppelgänger; it grossed a respectable $410 million globally.
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“Tron: Ares” arrives 15 years after “Legacy,” and takes the action outside of the virtual world for the first time, with Leto’s title character playing a digital soldier brought into the real world by Evan Peters’ tech bro character, Julian Dillinger (the namesake of the villain from the 1982 film). Bridges is reprising his role as Flynn, but any more details about his character were left for another day.
The first clip from the film debuted the first lightcycle chase in the movie, in which Dillinger appears to digitally “print” Ares and his compatriot Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), as well as their lightcycles. He then says they have only 30 minutes to find Eve Kim (Greta Lee), who’s left Dillinger’s company, Encom, with a memory stick containing important code. Ares uses traffic cameras to find Eve on her motorcycle; they almost capture her, slicing a police car in half in the process with the blade of light that streaks from behind the lightcycles. But Eve ultimately eludes them, winds up taking out Athena and commandeering her lightcycle.
In the second clip, Eve has entered the Grid, and Ares rescues her from an ocean of digital water. He materializes a lightboat and races them both to a portal into the real world, as Athena sends three drones to pursue them. Eve can hardly believe the sleek, glass-like beauty of the world that surrounds her, and agrees to help find the code to help Ares.
During the panel itself, Leto — who also produced the film, and has been attached to it since 2017 — pronounced himself “an official ‘Tron’ superfan” and said “if I wasn’t on the stage, I would be in the audience.” He said that when he filmed his first scene with Bridges, he blurted out “cut” mid-take.
“Everyone was surprised, because I don’t often do that,” Leto said. “The first AD comes over and said, ‘Is everything okay? What’s wrong?’ And I said, ‘I just can’t stop smiling, because I’m working with this guy.”
For his part, Bridges expressed delight at the fact that he’s still making “Tron” movies: “’82? 43 years ago? Come on, man!” But he said he started work on the film with a bit of apprehension.
“I remember the first day of wondering how it was going to be,” he said. “I heard Jared only wants to be called by his character. Everybody’s got different methods and modes. It’s a tough part, man, to play a program!”
Moderated by filmmaker and Comic-Con mainstay Kevin Smith, the panel maintained that lighthearted atmosphere throughout, which kept the conversation from going anywhere near the June Air Mail story in which nine women alleged that Leto engaged in misconduct with them during the 2000s. (Leto has denied any wrongdoing.)
Lee, marveling at the experience of her first Comic-Con, said she told her agents, “Find me something where I can ride a lightcycle.” Co-stars Arturo Castro and Hasan Minhaj, who play Encom executives, joked about the possible parallels between their film’s fictional company and the studio that made the movie.
“It was like walking into Disneyland every day,” Castro said of the sets. “And I’m not just saying that because they signed my checks, because they have my family.”
“Let this film bring as much shareholder value to the company as possible this quarter,” added Minhaj. “Really what this is about is Encom and its earnings, which is a metaphor for the Walt Disney Corporation, one of the best corporations.”
“Tron: Ares” will debut in theaters on Oct. 10.
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