Six years have gone by since it was first announced that Jared Leto was in talks to star in a Tron project called Tron: Ares – and now it looks like it’s finally making its way into production! Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales director Joachim Rønning signed on to direct the film at the start of the year. A couple months ago, we heard a rumor that Cillian Murphy might be reprising his Tron: Legacy role to be the villain in this film. Murphy’s involvement still hasn’t been confirmed, but now The Hollywood Reporter has broken the news that Leto is being joined in the cast by Evan Peters of WandaVision and Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.
The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t know who Peters will be playing in the movie, but they’ve heard the story calls for “a soldier in the computer world and an awkward gamer in the human world.”
Scripted by Jesse Wigutow and Jack Thorne, Tron: Ares is said to tell the story of the emergence of a sentient program that crosses over into the human world that is not ready for contact. Leto is playing Ares, “the manifestation of the program.”
For twenty-eight years, director Steven Lisberger’s cult classic Tron was a standalone sci-fi adventure. Then in 2010 Joseph Kosinski took fans back to the world of Tron with the film Tron: Legacy – and since then things have been a bit messy. Kosinski wanted to make a third Tron film, to be called Tron: Ascension, but Disney cancelled the project when their movie Tomorrowland underperformed. Apparently the script for Tron: Ascension would have featured a character named Ares… and somehow the idea for that character has evolved into Tron: Ares. Kosinski had said that he had nearly given Leto a cameo in Tron: Legacy, in the End of Line club where Lisberger did make a cameo.
Leto is producing Tron: Ares with Emma Ludbrook and Jeffrey Springer. Russell Allen serves as executive producer.
Are you interested in Tron: Ares? What do you think of Evan Peters joining Jared Leto in the cast? Let us know by leaving a comment below.