Jared Leto may have gotten the Grid shut down for good.
A new report from THR alleges that Disney is considering the nuclear option for the Tron franchise in the wake of Tron: Ares‘ struggling box office performance. The latest movie in the franchise opened last weekend to a $33.2 million domestic opening and only brought in around $60.2 million in total. As a point of comparison, Leto’s last high-profile flop, the critically maligned Sony Spider-Man spinoff vehicle Morbius, opened to $39 million in 2022 before going on to bring in just $167 million worldwide.
Now, according to the trade’s sources, it appears that Tron in general will “likely retire from the big screen.”
The franchise has never had the most stellar record at the box office, which is in part the reason why it took 28 years to see Tron: Legacy hit screens—and why even its own $400 million box office taking wasn’t deemed worthy enough to warrant a sequel for another 15 years. But for all the lingering controversies around its eclectic lead actor, it was Leto himself who played a major part in Tron: Ares happening at all.
Disney was in development on a new Tron movie as early as October 2010, with plans to create a direct sequel to the premise and characters introduced in Legacy. The project remained in limbo until 2015, when Disney officially greenlit a Legacy sequel, only to be dramatically scrapped by the studio months later. Leto spearheaded attempts to revive a soft reboot of the series, pushing plans to elevate the Ares character included in earlier drafts into a starring role for himself. By 2017, Leto was on board to both produce and star in the new project, culminating in the Tron: Ares we now see on screen, for better or worse.
But for all of Leto’s efforts—and it’s clear he is not the sole reason that Ares has failed to click with a significant chunk of critics and audiences alike—they may have only served to send Tron offline for good. He’s not done with genre roles any time soon though, considering he’s set to play Skeletor in the upcoming Masters of the Universe movie, but perhaps the days of the actor driving a product like Ares to fruition may be as over as the Tron franchise itself might be.
That’s the thing about Tron though: people have waited very long times to get more of it. The Grid might have the plug pulled for now, but it wouldn’t be that surprising to see someone else take a crack at rebooting it back to life in another decade or two.