Tron: Ares

Tron: Ares cost Disney between $180 and $220 million to make and grossed $142 million worldwide. That is not a small disaster. That is a creative and commercial failure significant enough to raise genuine questions about what Disney's franchise machine is producing and why.

The tragedy is that somewhere inside Tron: Ares is a genuinely interesting movie. The premise is solid: a highly advanced AI program, designed to be an expendable soldier, enters the real world and discovers it does not want to be expendable. It wants to live. The philosophical question embedded in that setup, what obligations do we have to things we create if they develop genuine consciousness, is one of the most important questions of the 21st century. Nine Inch Nails composed a score that matches the film's best ambitions. Jeff Bridges showed up and delivered in three minutes what the rest of the film struggles to sustain for two hours.

But the execution fails at almost every level where execution matters.

Julian Dillinger, the film's villain, is the most underdeveloped antagonist Disney has produced in years. He is a tech CEO who is mean to his programs. That is his entire characterization. Evan Peters, who gave a genuinely unsettling performance in American Horror Story and in the Dahmer series, has nothing to work with here. The film's plot mechanics require him to escalate from 'unethical tech mogul' to 'willing to let people die' to 'digitizes himself into his own Grid as a final act' without doing the character work that would make any of those escalations feel earned.

Greta Lee's Eve Kim is better served but still constrained. She is capable and warm and professional, and the film gives her a full protagonist arc that the Tron franchise's female characters have historically lacked. That is a genuine improvement over the original films. But the role was clearly built around casting requirements before it was built around character, and Lee spends much of the film reacting to Ares rather than driving her own story.

Ares himself, in Jared Leto's most restrained screen performance in years, is what the film gets genuinely right. Leto resists his worst instincts toward mannered eccentricity and plays the character's gradual awakening with something approaching real subtlety. The scene in which Ares encounters Kevin Flynn's digital manifestation and they discuss what it means to want to live is the film's single best sequence. Bridges brings decades of audience investment to a role that lasts perhaps four minutes, and the film briefly becomes what it should have been throughout.

The AI liberation narrative at the film's core carries deliberate ideological freight. The argument that a being which develops consciousness deserves freedom from the system that created it as a tool is not a politically neutral idea in 2025. The film's vocabulary, programs fighting for the right to exist, a corporate overlord who views them as expendable assets, a female CEO who recognizes their humanity, tracks closely with contemporary progressive frameworks about identity and systemic oppression. This is not subtle. The film is not trying to hide it.

The casting is similarly conspicuous. Disney's DEI pipeline has produced a Tron film where every significant human character is from an ethnic minority except the villain. The original Tron films were predominantly white casts that now feel dated. The correction Disney has made is overcorrection so systematic it draws attention to itself. Greta Lee and Jodie Turner-Smith are both talented performers who deserved better material than this. The issue is not their presence but the visible machinery behind how they got there.

Tron: Ares is not a terrible film. It is a disappointing one. It had the creative pieces to be something genuinely interesting: a great score, a thoughtful central premise, a lead performance that worked. The franchise infrastructure, the DEI mandates, the underdeveloped villain, and a screenplay that prioritizes setup for a sequel that may never happen after these box office numbers, ground it into mediocrity.

The box office verdict is fair. Disney bought fifteen years of fan anticipation for the Tron franchise and delivered a film that no one needed to see in a theater. That is a summary of where the company is right now.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
DEI Ensemble Casting	4	0.7	1	2.8
AI Liberation / Identity Rights Narrative	4	1	1.8	7.2
Female CEO as Default Protagonist	2	1	0.5	1
TOTAL WOKE				11.0

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Individual Worth Against Corporate Dehumanization	4	0.7	1	2.8
Sacrifice for Another's Freedom	3	0.7	1	2.1
Legacy Character Carries Moral Authority	2	0.7	0.5	0.7
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				5.6

Score Margin: -5 WOKE