When Tron first came out in 1982, it was a revelation. The movie was so far ahead of its time, every studio in Hollywood passed on the script and storyboards. Even after the project landed at Disney (in that dark and directionless time between Walt’s death and The Little Mermaid), it was considered a black sheep because the very notion of CGI animation pissed off all the animators who worked there. I need hardly add that this was a movie all about computers at a time when off-the-shelf personal computers were still a relative novelty and the world wide web was still a far-off dream.

Tron dramatized the inner workings of computers, computer programming, and the users’ relationship with both, all presented with bleeding-edge visual effects. As the years progressed, computers would only grow more advanced, leading to more intricate hardware and software, a more complex and pervasive internet, and VFX that could conjure pretty much anything imaginable. Thus, as the old fans lingered and new fans discovered Tron, there were slow and steady calls for a sequel to show what the modern world of technology would look like in the context of this franchise.

It really shouldn’t have been that hard. Trouble is, this is freaking Disney.

Remember, while Disney and their world-famous roster of Princesses have long had the young female demographic on lock, they’ve proven comically incapable of duplicating that success with teen and pre-teen boys. The Lion King was the one exception that really hit big, but I’m pretty sure animals have a more universal appeal. And let’s be real, Aladdin without Jasmine is a lot less interesting than the other way around.

At the end of the century, Disney Animation tried pivoting to films targeted more toward young boys — namely Hercules, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and Treasure Planet — to diminishing returns. (Yes, I know all three movies have gone through nostalgic reappraisal in recent years, they were all critical and box office disappointments at the time.) By the time Disney Animation tried to course-correct with Home on the Range and Princess and the Frog, the damage was done and Disney’s 2D animation department was effectively dead. Thus they pivoted to 3D animation, most notably with Tangled and Frozen. You know, the two films that Disney refused to name after their respective princesses for fear that it would alienate the young male audience.

While that was going on, Disney tried courting the young male demographic through buying out other companies and IPs. They bought Power Rangers in 2001, and then they sold it back to Saban ten years later because they couldn’t figure out how to make the franchise profitable without spending any money on it. They bought Marvel and set about devaluing the brand through aggressive oversaturation while also tanking their highest-profile female heroes. (Just look at what they did to Black Widow, The Marvels, She-Hulk, etc.) They bought LucasFilm and proceeded to destroy that particular brand through incompetent management (the sequel trilogy), aggressive oversaturation (all the multiple Disney+ series), and just plain abusing the fanbase (that Galactic Starcruiser fiasco).

Not even Disney’s live-action remakes were immune.

Yes, there was [a breaking point]. I was in a boardroom and some development guy said, “What’s gonna get the 35-year-old man in the audience?” And I just didn’t know what to say. I just was not in my element. I feel like I was naive, and then I felt a lot like the character in the story, trying to do something out of my element, and it was a funny parallel of the story for me.

And that, gentle readers, is why Sofia Coppola left the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, ultimately replaced by Rob Marshall.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having a niche. Blumhouse does shoestring horror films, A24 does heady indie movies, and they both have fans that love them for it. But this is Disney. They can’t only be content with making films for young girls and doing that better than everyone else — they’ve got to have EVERYTHING. It’s all four quadrants or nothing. This company needs to get the young male demographic if it kills them — and based on their established track record of trying, it just might.

Incidentally, you know what young boys like? Video games. And based on the recent box office successes of A Minecraft Movie, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Detective Pikachu, and all three Sonic films to date, it seems that young boys like film adaptations of video games. Problem: Disney doesn’t own any video game properties.

It’s Disney movies and cartoons that get adapted into video games, never the other way around. (Even Kingdom Hearts is only a hodgepodge of existing Disney properties held together with Tetsuya Nomura character designs and an incomprehensible plot.) I might further add that Disney typically farms out their video game projects to third parties, and they haven’t had an in-house games developer since Disney Interactive Studios shuttered in 2016. Without going into the long and embarrassing history there, the long and short of it is that nobody at Disney knows anything about video games. They know nothing about computers or computer culture.

This is most clearly visible in Wreck-it-Ralph, which tried to court video game fanatics (i.e. the young male demographic) by promising video game tributes and delivering 90 minutes of candy jokes. Even worse, the sequel showed blatant disregard for its own world-building, never mind the actual internet and how it works. And again — because Disney will never be content unless they have all four demographics all at once — the sequel centered the female lead and crowbarred in the Disney Princess stable while also cramming Star Wars references into this movie that was supposed to be aimed at young boys. The whole franchise was a hopeless mess.

Which brings us back to Tron. To repeat, any sequel to Tron had ONE. FUCKING. JOB: Show us what the modern online world would look like in the world of this franchise. It’s basic. It’s obvious. It’s clear. It’s simple. It’s interesting. It’s marketable. And they fucked it up.

I can cut Tron: Legacy some little slack with regards to that horrific de-aging effect on Jeff Bridges. That technology was still in its relative infancy at the time, and I can respect the filmmakers for trying out bleeding-edge VFX far ahead of its time in the innovative spirit of the first film. That doesn’t excuse the godawful plot or the wretched characters, however.

Most unforgivably, we never go to the internet. We never see what a laptop or a smartphone would look like or how it would work in the world of Tron. We spend the entire movie in a supercomputer from the early ’80s that has somehow grown only more advanced without any use or maintenance in the thirty intervening years. Seriously, how stupid are the Disney execs, and how stupid do they think we are?!

And now we’re getting Tron: Ares, made and marketed on the premise that the programs are coming to invade the real world. Doesn’t that sound cool?

…

…NO! WRONG! WRONG WRONG WRONG!

The whole point of the original Tron was that it made computers accessible. It gave us a whole new perspective on an increasingly online world. It showed the audience how computers worked and what computers could potentially do in a way that could get young viewers excited to learn about programming. We get none of that with a movie set entirely in the real world.

The setting of Tron: Legacy and the premise of Tron: Ares make it perfectly clear that Disney desperately wants to attract a demographic that loves video games and computer culture, but they’re clueless and incapable at speaking the language. They can only offer CGI set pieces and dazzling production design (for all its faults, Tron: Legacy had a phenomenal aesthetic) while bringing computer culture down to the corporate executives’ level because that’s all they know how to sell. It’s phony and insulting.

And then of course we’ve got Jared Leto. He’s been attached to this movie since 2017, and somehow, the Disney execs couldn’t shake him. I can only assume Leto got himself an iron-clad contract and some damn good lawyers, because the Disney execs had every reason to get him off this project. I’m not just talking about his shitty rock band or his multiple sexual assault allegations. And I’m not just talking about the shit he pulled on Suicide Squad that should’ve immediately gotten him blacklisted forever (Yes, I’m still pissed about that.). I’m not even talking about the worldwide laughingstock of Morbius (which no leading actor could’ve salvaged, let’s be real).

I’m talking about Haunted Mansion (2023). Disney’s big effort at revitalizing one of their most iconic Disneyland properties for the big screen, and they put Leto right up front as the main antagonist. And the movie was such a catastrophic bomb that it cost Disney a $117 million loss, on top of all their other highly public and disastrous losses that year.

Disney knows for a flat firsthand fact that Leto is poison and nobody likes him. In fact, looking at the posters and trailers that have come out for the movie, it seems an awful lot like Disney is putting a much heavier emphasis on the apocalyptic imagery, the Tron: Legacy aesthetic, and the new soundtrack from Nine Inch Nails. (Going from a pair of techno grandmasters to an industrial metal band? Bold strategy, let’s see how it pays off.) Seriously, looking at the official posters for this movie, I’m hard-pressed to find a single one with Leto’s name or face on it. Hell, the character’s back is to the camera in pretty much all of them!

Oh, and let’s not forget that the film is getting an October release. A big-budget four-quadrant sci-fi actioner is coming out… in October. To scrap it out with the horror movies and awards contenders.

I’m hard-pressed to find a single thread of hope regarding this one. It looks like the latest in Disney’s long line of fatal errors to try and court the young male demographic, and the PTB are acting like they know it. Tron deserved so much better than this, it’s such a damn shame the franchise belongs to such technologically illiterate and incurious meatheads.

Tron: Ares comes out on October 10th, 2025. Let’s get this over with.