After years of stops and stars, Tron 3 is moving forward at Disney. Jared Leto, who has been committed to the project since 2017, will be in talks to direct the feature film with frequent Disney collaborator Joachim Ronning. The film, titled Tron: Ares, is written by Jesse Wigutow and follows 2010’s Tron: Legacy.
Disney released the original Tron in 1982, starring Jeff Bridges as video game designer Kevin Flynn transported into his own creation and teaming up with Tron, a security program played by Bruce Boxleitner. At $33 million (around $100 million today), the film wasn’t considered a box office success, but it was admired for its groundbreaking visual effects and lingered in the public eye for years, eventually spawning the sequel Tron: Legacy.
This second Joseph Kosinski film, starring Bridges, Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde, made $400 million, not enough to launch a planned sequel starring Kosinski and his stars. After years of development, Disney officially scrapped a Kosinski sequel in 2015, and there have been various attempts to crack Tron 3 since then. Most recently, Lion filmmaker Garth Davis jumped in in 2020, but this iteration didn’t make any headway.
Ronning directed Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and co-directed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales with his Kon-Tiki co-director Espen Sandberg. He has completed filming on Daisy Ridley’s feature film Young Woman and the Sea. Ronning is represented by UTA, Brillstein Entertainment Partners and Sloane, Offer.
Leto starred in Spider-Man spinoff Morbius for Sony last year and WeCrashed on Apple TV+. The Oscar winner has Disney’s Haunted Mansion and Darren Aronofsky’s Adrift in mind. Leto is repeated by WME and Yorn, Levine.