How many successful film franchises are based on retro-classic video games? A couple that instantly come to mind are Super Mario Bros. and Sonic. I guess a better question to ask is how many successful film franchises have actually been built around Jared Leto?
As of mid-December 2025, that answer is still To Be Determined (although there have been numerous attempts, including Morbius, Blade Runner 2049, Haunted Mansion, Suicide Squad and other appearances within the Snyderverse. That’s not to say the Thirty Seconds to Mars musician can’t act — he won the 2014 Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role Academy Award for Dallas Buyers Club — but he simply doesn’t sell tickets at the box office.
Tron: Ares would be one more attempt for the actor-musician to headline a resetting franchise, this time it’s a throwback-themed console classic that video game fans of a certain age should flock to. But this big-screen mission is probably Leto’s last life as a headliner.
Tron: Ares picks up at an undetermined time frame after the events of Tron: Legacy (2010), which itself was supposed to renew interest in the sleeping franchise. This time around, dueling corporations battle to be the first to bring digital creations into the physical world. Can AI uplift humanity? Or will it simply create more unnecessary harm?
Ares (portrayed by Leto), aka Master Control, is the ultimate soldier. While being “the most sophisticated security system ever programmed,” he’s also a malfunctioning character that wants to live life off the grid. The McGuffin of the movie involves two lines of hidden code — The Permanence Code — that have been newly discovered, which Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) tried to hide years ago.
Will artificially intelligent technology run amok, while revolting against its creator and destroying the real world? And will Leto waste what little goodwill that audiences continue to give the entertainer with this franchise reboot of sorts?
“You think that you’re in control of this?”
There are two things each of the Tron films have been all about: Using cutting-edge graphics (at least at their time of release) and playing video game-inspired electronic music. Both are present here. The film looks and sounds great, but all the techno-speak jargon can be hard to handle at times. While Tron‘s world-building has always been great, housed inside what seems to be an ever-growing Grid, the final scripts of both Legacy and now, Ares, have felt like they were works in progress — always evolving like the AI it highlights — but incomplete upon release.
Here, Ares, the character, at least temporarily appears as both the protagonist and the antagonist of the movie. There’s a lot of moving parts attempting to interact simultaneously, leading to more than a few plot holes, but at least the movie looks and sounds good. Thanks to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (appearing as Nine Inch Nails, here), there’s shades of electropop here and techno there, but as a Child of the ’80s and fan of the previous two releases, I was hoping for a slice of some 8-bit music.
Getting back to Jared Leto, at least recently, the actor has been taking big swings at screenplays that may or may not be finished products, which are possibly hampered by him as a producer of said projects (at least he is here, for Tron: Ares). Box-office superiority is no sure thing in this day and age of endless streaming entertainment options, and Ares definitely underperformed, pulling in $142 million worldwide on a projected production budget of $220 million before publicity. And that really burns the bottom line.
I was shocked by some of the vulgar language that was mostly used near the film’s beginning, which made me question its PG-13 rating. It didn’t exactly feel kid friendly, when teens should definitely be its target audience, but the retro vibe definitely locks into adults seeking nostalgia, while it’ll surely receive an upcoming themed ride at Disney World.
I’m really glad Flynn found a way into the Ares storyline and I’m digging seeing Bridges continue his character, even though he was wrongly killed off in the previous outing. The retro vibe as Ares gets transported into an ’80s computer is everything to this film, I only wish it could have lasted longer and been incorporated into the script a little sooner. That was my biggest complaint, along with the assumption that everything technology related is wired online today, which simply isn’t true, even in the 21st century.
Jared Leto isn’t bad in Tron: Ares, but he isn’t the highlight, either. He was simply hired as a big-name, but that fact didn’t really bring in the necessary eyeballs to make this release financially successful. And how many more chances will the actor get before leaving Hollywood for good to fully focus on his musical career?
I guess we’ll get a hint next year, as he’ll appear as Skeletor in the reimagined Masters of the Universe. I’d rather see Leto work his way back up from more independent genre fare than appear in one more franchise flop.
“Maybe what emerges from the unknown isn’t scary…