Disney’s New Tron Movie with Jared Leto Lands Oscar-Nominated Director

Disney’s new TRON movie with Jared Leto has now landed Lion director Garth Davis. Davis has been quietly building acclaim on the indie movie front with projects like the 2016 multi-Oscar nominee Lion, or the 2018 Biblical film Mary Magdalene with Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix. Hearing Davis now partnering with the Oscar-winning Leto makes this project a TRON movie that will definitely be piquing the interests of both cinephiles and geeks alike. Deadline reports that Davis aggressively fought for the job and convinced Disney execs to give it to him. The latest script was done with Jesse Wigutow, who also did work on a script for The Crow reboot.

Jared Leto was rumored for aTRON reboot in 2017, playing a new character that (at the time) was named “Ares.” That project was said to not be a direct sequel to Tron: Legacy, but rather a new story built out of “source code” of the dead script for TRON 3.

Leto recently got the fanbase hyped when he seemed to indicate his TRON was still moving forward, by paying tribute to the original TRON film on social media: “38 years ago this film was released – it’s sparked my imagination and changed my life. Happy anniversary to the one and only TRON!”

Leto’s post came alongside rumors that this now-confirmed director search for TRON 3 was underway; that same report also stated that Tron: Legacy stars (Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, Jeff Bridges) and director Joseph Kosinski, could all be making a return for the next TRON movie, as well. The final sign that TRON was gaining new traction came from Disney music executive Mitchell Leib, who outright stated that the success of Disney+ could finally make TRON 3 a reality (as well as teasing Daft Punk’s return for the soundtrack!):

“Now with Disney+, I think there’s opportunities to be creating content that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to create,” Leib explained. “…So I had lunch with Paul Hahn to further a bit of a starting conversation that we’re looking at making a sequel to Tron now, we’re looking at Tron 3. And we’ve got a great script, I mean a really phenomenal script that we’re very excited about. Whereas the timing wasn’t right to have done it years ago, I think we feel like the timing is right now, and I feel like we’ve learned a lot of lessons from that last movie.

The right and first thing to do is to try and bring Daft Punk and would they want to,” Leib continued. “And the answer is they’re always open to anything and everything, but you gotta take it as it comes and see what the circumstances are. We don’t even know who would be directing it, I mean we’re hopeful Joe Kosinski would come back and do another one. A lot of things gotta fall into the right places, but certainly, there’s an open-mindedness to it.”

Well, now we know just how “open” Disney is to doing more TRON: enough to be stacking Oscar-worthy talent behind the series.

We’ll keep you updated on the status of the next TRON movie.