The Hollywood Reporter has learned that Suicide Squad‘s Jared Leto is eyeing the lead role in an upcoming TRON reboot from Disney. The studio is said to be in the earliest stages of development and haven’t found a writer or director yet, but apparently they want Leto to star.
What’s interesting about this is just the other day we heard that TRON: Legacy helmer Joseph Kosinski had some ideas for a sequel and that TRON 3 could still happen. It seems that plans have changed, however, and as of now it’s unclear if Kosinski will be involved in this new reboot.
For what it’s worth, here’s the director’s quote from earlier this week:
I guess I can say that TRON 3 is in cryogenic freeze. So, it’s there. It’s not dead. It’s alive, but it’s sitting there, waiting for the right time to move forward. I mean, you have to remember that when we made TRON: Legacy, Disney did not own Marvel. Disney did not own Lucasfilm…they own everything now. But this was before they owned everything, so from the studio point of view, they have a certain number of slots and a certain amount of money to make movies and if you can make a Star Wars spinoff or another Marvel movie, which are all doing incredibly well, a TRON movie, even though I think it would do very well, the question is: Would it do as well as one of those? That is more the reason we haven’t seen another TRON is that Disney stock is flushed with really successful properties right now. But that doesn’t mean we won’t see one at one point.
THR notes that this new project won’t be a direct sequel and will instead be “built out of the source code of the deleted TRON 3 script.” As for Leto, he’ll play Ares, a character who we haven’t seen on the big screen before but was apparently a key part of that aforementioned script. That’s all we’ve got to go on for now, but color us intrigued.
Admittedly, it seems a bit odd to reboot the franchise around such a polarizing actor, instead of just continuing on with TRON 3, but either way, we’re happy to hear that the property isn’t dead. There’s always been a lot of potential in TRON and perhaps this reboot will finally get things right. Time will tell, but feel free to share your thoughts on these recent developments in the usual place.