The Wait Is Over — TRON: Ares Hits Theaters October 10, 2025

San Diego Comic-Con is just a few days away, but Disney is stirring the pot in anticipation of its official presentation at the big annual event by unveiling a brand-new trailer for the long-awaited TRON: Ares.

Directed by Joachim Rønning, the sci-fi adventure is a new entry in the storied franchise and appears to take the series out of the digital Grid and into the real world.

The last time viewers were on the Grid was back in 2010 and TRON: Legacy. The film saw Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), son of the original TRON hero Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), race against time to stop Clu, a nefarious program that wants to rule the Grid, and end his plan to fuse the real world with the digital one. Sam did stop Clu, though, with the help of a rare isomorphic algorithm (ISO) named Quorra (Olivia Wilde), who was also running from Clu after he wanted to delete her.

Disney initially wanted to make a TRON 3 that would continue right where Legacy left off, and the film was approved in October 2010. The follow-up, which was to explore Sam and Quorra’s adventures, was about to see Sam take over his father’s company, ENCOM. However, things stalled, and in 2015, the sequel was cancelled after reports said that a lackluster performance from a previous Disney sci-fi property, Tomorrowland, had hurt the chances for a new TRON entry.

TRON has not seen a reboot, though. In 2020, the studio picked it back up, but this time as a standalone reimagining and not a direct sequel to Legacy. However, work did not start until 2021 due to production shutdowns because of the pandemic, and other industry-wide issues with ongoing Hollywood strikes over the last few years delayed it even further. Now the film is finally finished and getting a proper fall release.

Here’s what Disney has to say: “TRON: Ares follows a highly sophisticated Program, Ares, who is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission, which becomes humankind’s first encounter with A.I. beings.” Jared Leto stars as Ares, with Evan Peters as Julian Dillinger, Greta Lee as Eve Kim, Jodie Turner-Smith, Cameron Monaghan, Sarah Desjardins, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, and Gillian Anderson. Leto is joined by Bridges, who is back as Flynn, and the music is by Nine Inch Nails.

Trailer Teases: An AI Brought to the Real World for the First Time

In the first trailer unveiled in April, TRON fans were treated to the visual look they know and love: neon light grids, lightcycles, and intense digital landscapes. However, this time around, the trailer starts to shine a light on what the film is all about.

The trailer, released this week, opens with Julian Dillinger in front of a room of attendees, taking the stage like it’s a product keynote or something. He bellows to the crowd, “So much talk of AI and big tech today. Virtual worlds, what are they going to look like? When will we get there? Well, folks. We’re not going there. They are coming here.”

Dillinger, a businessman, is seemingly showing off his latest and greatest project. The “ultimate soldier,” Ares, is an Artificial Intelligence being that can destroy all enemies and is “biblically strong, lightning fast, and supremely intelligent.” But if you can’t trust one of these to do the work? Dillinger smugly says, “If he is struck down on the battlefield…” At this point, Dillinger yanks Ares to the ground and nearly chokes him out during his presentation, “…I will simply make you another.” There is no uncertainty that Dillinger is a bad apple in a corporate suit who thinks he has AI all figured out.

However, this trailer could not be more different from what Dillinger is so smugly confident it will be. As he seems to believe that Ares is his to do with as he pleases and bring on any digital threat, it looks as if Ares has his mission he will attempt to complete. As the TRON program searches for its objective, it also struggles to define what it is looking for. Perhaps Kevin Flynn will be the one who can help explain the conflict we could be looking at. As he appears in the virtual world to pontificate, “A malfunctioning program that wants to live, why is that?”

With Jeff Bridges set to appear as Flynn again, TRON fans have that original nostalgia to latch onto. However, Leto, as a learning AI making its way into the real world in Ares are new factors that change how the film looks at the long-term question of where man ends and the machine begins. There’s a whole lot of spectacle promised here, but with the look that Rønning is bringing, fans of the TRON visual palette should also be in for an experience that also asks hard questions of its audience.

TRON: Ares will have to wait just a little while longer for those who want to take it all in, but you can get it on October 10, 2025, in theaters across the country.