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I like that everyone but Jared Leto seems confused to be there. (via Disney)

Tron Ares opened last weekend, to a domestic box office haul of $33 million, which seems incredibly robust for a movie no one asked for, and yet was still, according to analysts, $10 million below projections. This was, obviously, a massive disappointment for a film budgeted at $180 million. The 15-years-late sequel to Tron Legacy, itself a 28-years-late sequel to Tron, bafflingly starred Jared Leto, and now, (30s radio voice) the industry rags are calling it curtains for the ostrich-faced oddball!

“‘Tron’ May Mark End of Jared Leto’s Franchise-Leading Days,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter.

“The ‘Tron: Ares’ Flop Will Probably End Jared Leto’s Leading Man Career,” added The Wrap.

These headlines, meanwhile, seemed to have the average moviegoer wondering, “wait, Jared Leto had a leading man career?”

It’s true, sort of!

Back in 2022, Leto starred in his very own superhero movie, playing the vampire Michael Morbius in the famously disastrous Morbius, debuting to anemic box office and eventual memes and Razzie nominations. Sample headline from then: “Jared Leto Used a Wheelchair for ‘Morbius’ Bathroom Breaks to Stay in Character, Director Says.”

The studio later mistook the ironic Morbius memes for genuine interest and put it back into theaters, at which point it promptly bombed again. Funny stuff, but this was the same Sony-Marvel division that brought us Madame Web (a masterpiece, in its way), so it’s hard to blame it all on Leto.

Yet somehow, here Leto was again “toplining” a franchise picture, despite increasingly loud whispers about him being a sex pest, and an exposé back in June detailing “nine allegations from women who described disturbing conduct, ranging from flirtatious overtures when they were minors to episodes of exposure.”

Actually, “whispers” isn’t quite right. People have been calling Jared Leto a creep out loud for many years. It just never seems to effect him. The same article notes a New York Post item about Leto from 2005 with the lede “Jared Leto Likes ‘Em Young.”

The New York Post alleged that he was more interested in groups of teenage models staying at the Maritime Hotel. “Girls from IMG, Elite, Next and Women are staying there, and Jared has been hitting on all of them,” an anonymous source told the paper. “He’s a serial texter. He is constantly texting these other 16- and 17-year-old girls. It’s really kind of creepy.”

It’s been 20 years since that Post piece and four months since the Airmail exposé (and varying years from countless other sly references like this one), but Leto was still out doing a full promotional tour for Tron Ares. In fact, it sounds like Leto was a driving force behind the movie getting made in the first place.

“The first iteration of the [Ares] script was a different movie, but it had a character named Ares,” screenwriter Jesse Wigutow told Polygon for an Oct. 11 story.

The version ultimately was shelved by Disney. But Leto wouldn’t give up. It didn’t hurt that he had a powerful ally in his corner — Sean Bailey, who was hired to run Disney’s live-action studio in 2010 by former Disney topper Rich Ross after he produced Tron: Legacy. And he also had goodwill from his lauded earlier dramatic work in Dallas Buyers Club (winning him a supporting actor Oscar) and Requiem for a Dream. The pitch worked, and by 2017, Leto was elevated to producer, and the movie’s narrative was reframed so that the protagonist became Ares, his character. Leto not only got his Tron movie — he was now the star. (Bailey, the movie’s chief proponent within the studio, was shown the door last year, but has a producing deal at Disney.) [THR]

So, to recap, Leto apparently had enough goodwill from Dallas Buyers Club (in 2013) and Requiem for a Dream (in 2000!) to get an entire Tron sequel redesigned around his character and essentially double his (“seven-figure”) fee by getting a producer credit. And then despite the studio head who cosigned it all leaving last year, the movie still got made, released, and heavily promoted by its star actor. That kind of lame duck inertia isn’t unheard of in Hollywood, I suppose, but it is strange the way things always seem to work out for Jared Leto.

It all seems hard to explain, possibly because trying to write anything about Jared Leto always ends up being exhausting. It took me a week just to finish this, which I originally envisioned as a straightforward box office recap. Aside from all the (allegedly!) being creep and enjoying underage girls stuff (the story well told here), there are also whispers that Leto is everything from “an op,” a “CIA plant,” to “running a cult straight out of a true crime docuseries.” (Relatedly, the Jared Leto True Anon episode is a great listen).

It’d all be hilarious that people could think such things about the guy who put himself in a wheelchair because he got too fat while trying to method act as Mark David Chapman for a movie no one saw and sent his used condoms to his costars while method acting to play an evil clown. And yet, there always seems to be juuuust enough evidence for every grandiose-sounding Leto accusation to at least go, “huh, that is weird…”

As John Leavitt wrote on BlueSky the other day, “Jared Leto’s career feels like a MKULTRA project they forgot about.”

And actually, the Suicide Squad condom story actually turns out to be illustrative of so many Leto stories. Leto himself said he was doing all these crazy things to method act as the Joker during the movie’s press tour. The rest of the cast yes-anded him at the time. And then, months after the movie came out, Leto claimed he never did any of this at all and it had been blown out of proportion by the media. All of which left us to wonder whether he was full of shit originally, in the middle, or at the end. Leto is like a one-man disinformation machine, and no fun to fact-check to boot, since almost everything he says is corny and dull.

To wit, here he is clarifying: