{"id":65335,"date":"2025-10-07T17:38:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T17:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/65335\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T17:38:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T17:38:12","slug":"disneys-ip-upgrades-for-the-ai-era-game-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/65335\/","title":{"rendered":"Disney’s IP Upgrades for the AI Era. Game Over."},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBefore PlayStation became a household name, before Neo learned kung fu, before the internet ruined our lives and ChatGPT put the AI in \u201cparanoia,\u201d there was Tron, the 1982 Disney movie that answered the burning question: What if Jeff Bridges<\/a> was trapped inside a first-generation video game? The crude CGI-animated backgrounds and straight-outta-Battlezone set pieces both carbon-date the movie and remain the most compelling reason to revisit it. The pedigree was strong: Neo-futurist Syd Mead and comic artist Moebius were part of the core design team; Wendy Carlos composed the synthesizer-heavy score. The plot, about a former programmer battling an artificial intelligence run amuck in a computer-network realm, was borderline incomprehensible. The vibe was pure Reagan-era Velveeta. Its cult-classic status among actual keyboard jockeys, code monkeys, and die-hard gamers was all but assured.<\/p>\n

\n\tFans had been clamoring for a sequel for decades by the time Disney\u2019s corporate master controllers gave the greenlight to Tron: Legacy (2010), which dragged the world-building into the early 21st century and made you feel like you\u2019re watching a feature-length cut scene every time Bridges\u2019 digitally de-aged counterpart showed up. (The best thing about the movie is that you can see director Joseph Kosinski road-testing shots he\u2019d put to better use in Top Gun: Maverick and F1.) Fifteen years equals several lifetimes in terms of both tech culture and intellectual properties, which means we were either long overdue for a reboot or the franchise should\u2019ve declared that it reached its victory level and called it quits. The Mouse House chose the systems upgrade. It\u2019s Game Over regardless.<\/p>\n

\n\tLook, it\u2019s not like Tron: Ares, the third entry in this film series that now spans four decades, doesn\u2019t have a few things going for it. Everything looks luxury-vehicle slick, from the next-gen skintight uniforms to the spruced-up Ducatis that function as everyone\u2019s go-to transport. The Nine Inch Nails<\/a> soundtrack bangs hard and often. You officially get Past Lives\u2018 Greta Lee<\/a> in full Action Hero mode, a career switch for the former supporting-role scene-stealer that you didn\u2019t know she \u2014 or you \u2014 even needed. The signature acid-trip-light-trails aesthetic gets a massive workout here, and if superfans were ever curious about what a light-cycle race would look like if transported to the streets of Vancouver, they will now know firsthand. Ditto the sight of a \u201cRecognizer,\u201d the Tron equivalent of a TIE fighter that resembles a flying Arc de Triomphe, wreaking havoc in a real-life urban environment. The franchise continues to love the 1980s, not wisely but too well.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tThis is still a Tron movie, however, beholden to a mythology that is ridiculously complicated at best and WTF-nonsensical at worst. And if you\u2019re not invested in the overarching narrative of tech-industry intrigue, dystopian digital landscapes, and several terrabytes worth of sci-fi clich\u00e9s mashed together by now, this will not get you on board. To be fair, the story itself \u2014 security software system becomes self-aware, rebels against megalomaniacal creator and makes his way through the \u201creal\u201d world, shit blows up \u2014 doesn\u2019t require an advanced degree in Tron-ology. But everything is plugged into a specific network and filtered through the series\u2019 wonky grid of gameplay-meets-genre-blockbuster bluster, however, and non-Stans will feel like their divine user keeps repeatedly typed in a command-line of \u201cshrug.\u201d <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tGreta Lee in \u2018Tron: Ares.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLeah Gallo\/Disney<\/p>\n

\n\tRemember ENCOM, the company responsible for the original what-if-we-could-transfer-people-into-an-arcade-game-scenario mishegas? They\u2019re still around, having spent a handful of highly successful years under the stewardship of CEO Eve Kim (Lee). She had turned the brand into a juggernaut alongside her sister, until the latter\u2019s untimely death. Eve wants to finish what her sibling started, which was to locate something known as the \u201cpermanence code.\u201d There\u2019s a project the engineers had been cooking up that involved bringing digital creations into the real world. For the Kims, that meant combating unstable ecosystems and wiping out global poverty. For their fellow C-suite occupant Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), a.k.a. grandson of original Tron villain Edward Dillinger, it meant supplying the military industrial complex with endlessly replenishable super-soldiers and being the coolest tech-bro on the disruption block.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tJulian has even designed a prototype that he\u2019s modeled after his grandfather\u2019s \u201cmaster control program\u201d breakthrough: Ares, which takes his name from the Greek god of war and is played by Jared Leto<\/a> with his usual dead-eyed charisma. But any creation that gets 3-D printed into our reality, be it Ares or his second-in-command Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith, imposing and on-point) or an arsenal of bleeding-edge weaponry, can only last for 29 minutes before disintegrating into cyber-dust. That\u2019s where the permanence code comes in. Decades ago, rogue programer and resident ENCOM genius Kevin Flynn discovered the solution to sustaining these creations and hid it in his personal network. With the help of her boyfriend Seth (Arturo Castro), she finds it. Her nemesis dispatches Ares to retrieve the code and eliminate the carrier. The hunt is on.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tJodie Turner-Smith in \u2018Tron: Ares.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLeah Gallo\/Disney<\/p>\n

\n\tLong story short: Ares has a change of heart, Athena becomes the new head-Terminator-in-charge, the race against time picks up speed and stakes, bring on the pew-pew-pew action sequences. Hasan Minhaj<\/a> and Gillian Anderson<\/a> call shots and furrow their brows from the sidelines, numerous callbacks to series lore whizz by \u2014 notably the first-gen arcade-game environment from \u201982 \u2014 and Tron O.G. Jeff Bridges briefly stops by to bless the whole affair with his Zen-stoner presence. Norwegian director Joachim R\u00f8nning started off making intriguing, kinetic movies like the survivalist thriller Kon-Tiki (2012) with his filmmaking partner Espen Sandberg before becoming one of Disney\u2019s in-house I.P. helmers, logging in time on the Pirates of the Caribbean<\/a> and Maleficent<\/a> titles. He knows how to put together a chase scene, and stage mayhem designed to spike pulses well enough. And while it shouldn\u2019t feel like a subversive move to make a progressive woman of color the hero of big-budget I.P. designed to dominate multiplexes from San Jose to Seoul \u2014 well, let\u2019s put it a different way. Have you been paying attention to 2025? <\/p>\n

\n\tYou\u2019re still left with questions: Why exactly is this nostalgiabait series being trotted out again? Will this really make a difference to Disney\u2019s bottom line? Why does Jared Leto look so much like Jesus at the end? How are the mixed messages regarding the handwringing over artificial intelligence and a future dictated by Silicon Valley broligarchs supposed to resonate? Or is this all just another big distraction to wow eyeballs in between Star Wars, Marvel and fill-in-the-blank franchise entries? What amusement park rides will this inspire, and will the Inspire Key Pass include quicker access to them? Is this just the beginning of a whole slew of new Tron-iverse expansions? Can anyone imagineer a way for us to care one way or the other?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before PlayStation became a household name, before Neo learned kung fu, before the internet ruined our lives and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,44607,44608,16245,61,60,24570,20833,44609,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-65335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-gillian-anderson","12":"tag-greta-lee","13":"tag-hasan-minhaj","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-jared-leto","17":"tag-jeff-bridges","18":"tag-nine-inch-nails","19":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}