EXCLUSIVE: There’s more bleeding red neon than imagined coming out of Disney‘s Tron: Ares. Deadline has learned from sources that the third chapter in the 43-year old videogame matrix protagonist story actually cost $220 million net, not the reported $170 million to $180 million that was floated out there.
This means that the Jared Leto-Grace Lee-Jeff Bridges light cycle movie is headed for a $132.7 million loss after all ancillaries, that is if its final global gross smacks dead into a wall at $160 million. The Joachim Rønning directed movie counted through its second weekend yesterday a running worldwide cume of $103 million with a -67% second weekend domestic plummet of $11.1M.
At a $160 million box office threshold Tron: Ares triggers $72.2 million in worldwide theatrical rentals, $37.6M in global home entertainment, close to a $100M in global home television, with an extra $5 million from airlines for a total of $214.8M in revenues. Put this up against the $220 million net production cost shot with Vancouver, Canada tax credits, a $102.5M global P&A spend with stunts at San Diego Comic-Con, touring light cycles, a laser light Nine Inch Nails concert at the LA premiere which closed down Hollywood Blvd, $10.8M in others costs and $14.2M in residuals which gets you to total costs of $347.5M. That gets us to a $132.7 million loss.
Exclaimed one astute talent rep on why it was game over for Tron: Ares at this October’s box office, “There was no specific vision, to be honest. The idea that Disney would spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a Jared Leto film that is a franchise that hasn’t worked in four decades is insane.”
While we’ve told you the shortcomings with this Disney reboot swing and a miss, i.e. the finite appeal of the Tron franchise (it bombed when it first came out in the 1980s, gained a cult status on home video, and had an OK revival in 2010 a year after the first Avatar making $400M) and the limited draw of non-Star Wars and some non-Star Trek sci-fi movies overall (such fare typically opens in the $24M-$40M range; anything over $50M or even $100M is far and few between), ultimately Tron‘s faulty battery was its screenplay. Great screenplays overcome great historical hurdles, read Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean proved pirate movies can work, and most recently, Denis Villeneuve post another pricey, finite sci-fi fan reboot which flopped, 2018’s Blade Runner 2049 ($185M cost, $92M domestic, near $278M worldwide gross; which also starred Leto), proved post Covid that there was heart and chills in Frank Herbert’s Dune series (combined global gross of $1.1 billion); an IP that sunk like quick sand 41 years ago with a domestic take of $31.4M.
So, don’t blame former Disney production head and Tron: Ares producer Sean Bailey for doing his job, championing a franchise revival (duh, it’s those events that work theatrically), carefully. Tron: Legacy‘s box office haul was an improvement definitely upon the original though not Avatar spectacular. That 2010 movie was early proof of the talents of filmmaker Joseph Kosinski who would deliver unto the world, Top Gun: Maverick and F1. Hence, a sequel because of Legacy‘s alright results wasn’t rushed to the screen. Originally the third Tron was conceived as a sequel to Legacy with Kosinski returning alongside the characters played by Olivia Wilde and Garrett Hedlund. The notion of Tron coming into our world ala Ares was always part of the third chapter, I’m told.
However, I hear that Rønning wanted a different script on the film other than the Jesse Wigutow one which Disney pushed to greenlight. The filmmaker, who can deliver character driven stories at a low budget ala the Oscar nominated Kon-Tiki and Young Woman in the Sea, as well as Disney commercial fare such as Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, was lobbying for Ford v. Ferrari‘s Jez Butterworth. At the end of the initial shoot, we hear that Oscar nominated Captain Phillips screenwriter Billy Ray had to step in to deliver pages to fix various parts of Tron: Ares, that work amounting to less than a month’s worth of reshoots.
Many would like to throw tomatoes at Disney for the casting, that there’s zero audience attraction for the likes of Leto, Lee, etc. First, despite tabloid headlines about Leto’s alleged behavior, such noise doesn’t factor into moviegoers’ decisions to buy or not buy a ticket. It could be argued that they’re not even in the know of the Air Mail feature. Tron is the star at the end of the day. Had the fan faithful declared it was a better movie than the last, perhaps we’d see an expansion of the audience and some box office momentum, rather than falling short of its $40M domestic opening projection with $33.2M. Moviegoers gave Tron: Ares the same CinemaScore as Tron: Legacy, a B+, which indicates there was no reason to have any FOMO. Definite recommend was an OK 57% on Screen Engine/Comscore’s PostTrak; a score in the mid sixty percentile to seventy-plus range indicates a hopeful tentpole has electricity. Tron: Ares was older skewing with 70% over 25 indicating both the Gen-X and Legacy millennial fans showed up, however, as far as making new fans, Tron: Ares had very little appeal from the 13-17 crowd who showed up at 6%. While the Gen X core Tron fans gave Tron:Ares a very high 71%+ definite recommend, the 18-24 set gave it the lowest of any demographic at 44%. Not good.
Even with Tron being the headliner, when we look at the remake of Dune, there was something undeniable for audiences about watching Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet in what is a Byzantine IP. Natch, yes, there is something to be said about star appeal, but there are few who can open a film, and typically IP is enough for studios’ execs to sleep soundly at night. Still, a Tron reboot with someone bigger than a House of Gucci and Morbius star could have worked. But again, the blip with Tron:Ares remains its story.
‘The franchise is dead’ was the emphatic proclamation about Tron: Ares after it failed on opening weekend. Let’s take that with a grain of salt. First, those close to the project believe that ultimately Tron:Ares was an advertisement for the Disney theme park rides (which was also one of the catalysts as to why Tron: Ares was made, versus say any Disney+ viewership of the previous Tron movies). In any given day at the Shanghai theme park and Walt Disney World in Orlando, the Tron ride is the one with the biggest lines next to Pirates of the Caribbean.
Second, with any of these sci-fi franchises, even when they stumble, there’s a gap in years between bombs and revivals, i.e. 1997’s Alien Resurrection and 2004’s Alien vs. Predator, Tim Burton’s poorly received 2001 Planet of the Apes and 2011’s start of a new trilogy, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and so, on. Let’s face it, even Superman looked like he was gone after the last two Christopher Reeves movies Superman III (a zany Richard Pryor comedy with a final $80.2M global) and 1987’s Superman IV: Quest for Peace ($30.2M global), and Bryan Singer’s bloated budgeted 2006 Superman Returns ($391M off a $204M net cost). But this past summer we had James Gunn’s Superman which is one of the highest grossing of all-time for the DC superhero at a near $616M.
It’s fair to say that time heals all franchise wounds.
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