Comic-Con 2025: Disney’s Tron: Ares Teases Dark New Era with Jared Leto and Nine Inch Nails Score

By The Big Magazine Staff

Tron is back—sleeker, darker, and louder than ever and this is not the same Grid.

Tron: Ares, Disney’s long-awaited third installment in the cult sci-fi franchise, just made its presence known in a big way at CineEurope 2025 with a jaw-dropping first look, followed days later by a surprise teaser drop during a high-voltage panel at Comic-Con 2025.

Photo: Disney's Tron: Ares lightcycle installiation at Comic Con San Diego 2025 by The Big Magazine

Jared Leto stars as Ares, a sentient program who escapes the digital realm and enters the human world—an evolution that kicks off what Disney is calling a “dark new era” for the franchise. Directed by Garth Davis (Lion), Ares marks the boldest expansion of the Tron mythology yet, with a gritty aesthetic, real-world stakes, and a haunting industrial score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails.

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The SDCC panel featured 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, hinting at a deeper narrative that blurs the line between human and program.

“The world of Tron is evolving—and so are the stakes,” Leto told the crowd. “Ares isn’t just a program. He’s a being trying to find his place in a world that didn’t create him.” The teaser footage confirms the stakes, as Ares crashes through barriers between realities, hunted by forces that fear what he represents: a digital entity seeking freedom in the physical world.

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Directed by Garth Davis (Lion), Tron: Ares is described as both a reboot and a sequel, pushing the Tron mythology beyond neon circuitry and into the questions of AI sentience, identity, and rebellion.

Fans at Comic-Con got an extended version of the trailer, along with sneak previews of Turner-Smith’s mysterious resistance leader and Thatcher’s hacker character navigating a shattered interface between The Grid and Earth.

In one of two clips previewed by Disney, Leto’s Ares and Turner-Smith’s Athena are created by Evan Peters’ big tech villain, a descendant of Ed Dillinger from the original film. Dillinger assigns these programs to retrieve a valuable piece of code from Greta Lee’s Eve, who also has a motorcycle, although it pales in comparison to their powerful red lightcycles. Lee’s Eve lures Athena up a spiral parking garage tunnel and knocks her off her lightcycle.

To safeguard the hard drive containing the code, Eve had to jump on the lightcycle to escape from a revived Athena, the bionic woman who survived the multi-story fall and ran back up, allowing Eve to narrowly escape.

Based on Variety’s report, insiders say Disney is betting big on Ares to kickstart a new trilogy and launch an interconnected Tron multiverse across platforms.

With a theatrical release set for October 10, 2025, Tron: Ares has officially entered the hype zone.

The revolution isn’t coming. It’s uploading.

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