No, Dr. Doom didn’t show up at this year’s Comic-Con. But Disney sure as hell brought the dazzle with a laser light show that one-upped what they pulled off at CinemaCon, complete with a Tron: Ares logo in full neon red and two Tron-like warriors marching to the front of the stage.
“Did you see that entrance?” asked moderator Kevin Smith, “That cost more than Clerks!“
At the panel were director Joachim Rønning with stars Jared Leto, Evan Peters, Arturo Castro, Gillian Anderson, Cameron Monaghan, Jodie Turner-Smith, Greta Lee, and Jeff Bridges who reprises his role as Kevin Flynn, the programmer from the original 1982 movie who gets caught in his own videogame. Leto drew big cheers from the crowd, as did Bridges.
In the third Tron movie, a highly sophisticated program, Ares (played by Oscar winner Leto) is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission. Evan Peters is the evil tech exec Julian Dillinger.
Bridges exclaimed about the legacy of the franchise, “1982! 43 years ago! C’mon man! And we’re continuing the story? Steven (Lisberger) created this wild world that was so fun to be a part of.”
The Oscar winning Dude then lamented, “These times, artificial intelligence is on everybody’s minds and hearts these days.”
‘Tron Ares’
Walt Disney Studios
“The most important thing is that we kick this technology around artistically before it kicks us around,” Lisberger said. “I’m eeries about hearing the grim news about the future. And the way to avoid that is to get talented people like the crew that’s on my left and inspire young people about what can be done with this technology.”
“That’s what Tron is all about,” he added.
“I am an official Tron superfan. If I wasn’t on the stage, I would be in the audience right now cheering like all these crazy people here,” Leto said. “It was 1982, video games were exploding and films were a huge part of my life when I was a kid. This movie just grabbed hold of me. It grabbed my imagination, and it showed me what was possible in the world. Movies like this really gave me something to dream for and dream about.”
“We worked on this movie for 9, I think it’s 10 years now. It started with the word Ares,” the Dallas Buyers Club Oscar winner said.
“I just can’t stop smiling because I’m working with [Jeff Bridges],” he added after explaining that his first scene shooting, he yelled “Cut!” right away.
The ‘Tron: Ares’ panel Friday at Comic-Con
Michael Buckner
“Greta, you got a script for this, and you’re like this is like Past Lives,” joked Smith.
“There’s only two people in this room who get that joke,” said Lee who then quipped the only reason why she wanted to do Tron: Ares is because “I got to ride a lightcycle.”
In one of two clips previewed by Disney, Leto’s Ares and Turner-Smith’s Athena are generated by Evan Peters’ big tech villain, descendant of Ed Dillinger from the first film. Dillinger tasks these programs to retrieve a valuable piece of code from Greta Lee’s Eve, who has a motorcycle of her own, though it is nothing compared to their roaring red lightcycles. Lee’s Eve bates Athena up through a spiral parking garage tunnel and knocks her off her lightcycle. You can guess what came next. To protect the hard drive with the code on it, Eve had to hop on the light cycle to get away from a revived Athena, bionic woman who survived the couple-story fall and ran back up only for Eve to barely get away.
The audience also heard from Minhaj, whose official role is the Chief Technical Officer for Encom, and Castro, who jokingly claimed he thought they “were shooting a rom com” before he saw the new footage in the room.
The second clip showed Ares and Eve now seemingly teamed up while Athena, who is Ares’ second in command, hunts them down. Eve has a disc of her own, and she is limned in the light blue light reminiscent of Tron: Legacy. Ares takes her on a hybrid water ski and submarine vehicle to get her to the transfer portal, striking a bargain with her that he will help her escape if she brings him the code Dillinger originally wanted. Ares, whose disc is triangular, disobeyed his directive from Dillinger, and now he wants the code for himself.
Grammy-winning rock band Nine Inch Nails, is behind the score for Tron: Ares a la pop band Daft Punk, who composed the score for the 2010 movie, Tron: Legacy. Last week, the Nine Inch Nails ditty from the movie “As Alive As You Need Me To Be” was dropped. It’s the group’s first music in five years. When asked why he wasn’t consulted about the music, Leto said that NIN “absolutely” filled the big shoes left behind by the electronic dance-pop duo.
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