Disney’s IP Upgrades for the AI Era. Game Over.

Before PlayStation became a household name, before Neo learned kung fu, before the internet ruined our lives and ChatGPT put the AI in “paranoia,” there was Tron, the 1982 Disney movie that answered the burning question: What if Jeff Bridges was trapped inside a first-generation video game? The crude CGI-animated backgrounds and straight-outta-Battlezone set pieces both carbon-date the movie and remain the most compelling reason to revisit it. The pedigree was strong: Neo-futurist Syd Mead and comic artist Moebius were part of the core design team; Wendy Carlos composed the synthesizer-heavy score. The plot, about a former programmer battling an artificial intelligence run amuck in a computer-network realm, was borderline incomprehensible. The vibe was pure Reagan-era Velveeta. Its cult-classic status among actual keyboard jockeys, code monkeys, and die-hard gamers was all but assured.

Fans had been clamoring for a sequel for decades by the time Disney’s corporate master controllers gave the greenlight to Tron: Legacy (2010), which dragged the world-building into the early 21st century and made you feel like you’re watching a feature-length cut scene every time Bridges’ digitally de-aged counterpart showed up. (The best thing about the movie is that you can see director Joseph Kosinski road-testing shots he’d put to better use in Top Gun: Maverick and F1.) Fifteen years equals several lifetimes in terms of both tech culture and intellectual properties, which means we were either long overdue for a reboot or the franchise should’ve declared that it reached its victory level and called it quits. The Mouse House chose the systems upgrade. It’s Game Over regardless.

Look, it’s not like Tron: Ares, the third entry in this film series that now spans four decades, doesn’t have a few things going for it. Everything looks luxury-vehicle slick, from the next-gen skintight uniforms to the spruced-up Ducatis that function as everyone’s go-to transport. The Nine Inch Nails soundtrack bangs hard and often. You officially get Past Lives‘ Greta Lee in full Action Hero mode, a career switch for the former supporting-role scene-stealer that you didn’t know she — or you — even needed. The signature acid-trip-light-trails aesthetic gets a massive workout here, and if superfans were ever curious about what a light-cycle race would look like if transported to the streets of Vancouver, they will now know firsthand. Ditto the sight of a “Recognizer,” the Tron equivalent of a TIE fighter that resembles a flying Arc de Triomphe, wreaking havoc in a real-life urban environment. The franchise continues to love the 1980s, not wisely but too well.

This is still a Tron movie, however, beholden to a mythology that is ridiculously complicated at best and WTF-nonsensical at worst. And if you’re not invested in the overarching narrative of tech-industry intrigue, dystopian digital landscapes, and several terrabytes worth of sci-fi clichés mashed together by now, this will not get you on board. To be fair, the story itself — security software system becomes self-aware, rebels against megalomaniacal creator and makes his way through the “real” world, shit blows up — doesn’t require an advanced degree in Tron-ology. But everything is plugged into a specific network and filtered through the series’ wonky grid of gameplay-meets-genre-blockbuster bluster, however, and non-Stans will feel like their divine user keeps repeatedly typed in a command-line of “shrug.”

Remember ENCOM, the company responsible for the original what-if-we-could-transfer-people-into-an-arcade-game-scenario mishegas? They’re still around, having spent a handful of highly successful years under the stewardship of CEO Eve Kim (Lee). She had turned the brand into a juggernaut alongside her sister, until the latter’s untimely death. Eve wants to finish what her sibling started, which was to locate something known as the “permanence code.” There’s a project the engineers had been cooking up that involved bringing digital creations into the real world. For the Kims, that meant combating unstable ecosystems and wiping out global poverty. For their fellow C-suite occupant Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), a.k.a. grandson of original Tron villain Edward Dillinger, it meant supplying the military industrial complex with endlessly replenishable super-soldiers and being the coolest tech-bro on the disruption block.

Julian has even designed a prototype that he’s modeled after his grandfather’s “master control program” breakthrough: Ares, which takes his name from the Greek god of war and is played by Jared Leto with his usual dead-eyed charisma. But any creation that gets 3-D printed into our reality, be it Ares or his second-in-command Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith, imposing and on-point) or an arsenal of bleeding-edge weaponry, can only last for 29 minutes before disintegrating into cyber-dust. That’s where the permanence code comes in. Decades ago, rogue programer and resident ENCOM genius Kevin Flynn discovered the solution to sustaining these creations and hid it in his personal network. With the help of her boyfriend Seth (Arturo Castro), she finds it. Her nemesis dispatches Ares to retrieve the code and eliminate the carrier. The hunt is on.

Long story short: Ares has a change of heart, Athena becomes the new head-Terminator-in-charge, the race against time picks up speed and stakes, bring on the pew-pew-pew action sequences. Hasan Minhaj and Gillian Anderson call shots and furrow their brows from the sidelines, numerous callbacks to series lore whizz by — notably the first-gen arcade-game environment from ’82 — and Tron O.G. Jeff Bridges briefly stops by to bless the whole affair with his Zen-stoner presence. Norwegian director Joachim Rønning started off making intriguing, kinetic movies like the survivalist thriller Kon-Tiki (2012) with his filmmaking partner Espen Sandberg before becoming one of Disney’s in-house I.P. helmers, logging in time on the Pirates of the Caribbean and Maleficent titles. He knows how to put together a chase scene, and stage mayhem designed to spike pulses well enough. And while it shouldn’t feel like a subversive move to make a progressive woman of color the hero of big-budget I.P. designed to dominate multiplexes from San Jose to Seoul — well, let’s put it a different way. Have you been paying attention to 2025?

You’re still left with questions: Why exactly is this nostalgiabait series being trotted out again? Will this really make a difference to Disney’s bottom line? Why does Jared Leto look so much like Jesus at the end? How are the mixed messages regarding the handwringing over artificial intelligence and a future dictated by Silicon Valley broligarchs supposed to resonate? Or is this all just another big distraction to wow eyeballs in between Star Wars, Marvel and fill-in-the-blank franchise entries? What amusement park rides will this inspire, and will the Inspire Key Pass include quicker access to them? Is this just the beginning of a whole slew of new Tron-iverse expansions? Can anyone imagineer a way for us to care one way or the other?