How Real Life AI Changed The Creation Of Tron: Ares [Exclusive]

Thematically speaking, "Tron" was years ahead of its time when released in 1982, anticipating debates we're currently plagued with regarding artificial intelligence, curating our digital identity, data privacy, and the growing influence of tech giants outside of the tech sector. More significantly, it was cinema's first serious attempt to visualize the digital realm, then dubbed "cyberspace" but now probably more commonly known as "the metaverse." Its wireframe landscapes and black-and-neon palette may read as retro-futurist kitsch, but the film's visual language has proven remarkably durable, inspiring countless imitators and earning its place as a landmark in the evolution of digital world-building on screen.

And it worked — because the original "Tron" and, to some extent, "Tron: Legacy" of 2010, are films that personify the mysterious and sometimes confusing landscapes of technology, albeit back when the general public didn't really have a clue about how any of it functioned.

Now, in 2025, when "Tron: Ares" has hit theaters, it's during a time when babies understand how to find their favorite show by clicking on app images on an iPad, and we have people suffering from ChatGPT psychosis in full-blown romantic relationships with AI companions. Critics have been mixed about the effectiveness of "Tron: Ares," and there's been much discussion centered on the seeming box office poison of Jared Leto, but the fact that our collective understanding of technology has "caught up" to "Tron" certainly complicated things, especially concerning artificial intelligence. According to screenwriter Jesse Wigutow, it directly impacted how the "Ares" script took shape.

Jesse Wigutow has been on a journey with "Tron: Ares" for the last 13 or so years, and even in that time, our relationship with AI has changed considerably. "When we first started, there was this concept of an 'AI program with a very specific purpose that challenged that purpose,' but at the time, AI was very much being pursued, but more in the research space," Wigutow tells me. "And I'm sure there are things that I wasn't aware of at the time that were happening, but it was not in the public sphere in any way, shape, or form in the way that it is today." Researchers have been experimenting with AI as early as the 1950s, but what the average Joe thinks of "AI" today is the generative technology that has emerged in the last five or so years.

"You're speaking to the idea of people having full-blown relationships with their AI companions, and that was not a thing 13 years ago," Wigutow explains. "On one level, we've had to kind of chase the technology in a way that we really did not anticipate — or I didn't anyways, maybe some of the producers did — and the kind of explosive growth of it." This meant that taking a Program and positing it as something into the future no longer felt like a possibility of something existing perhaps 50 years into the future, but instead something that feels possible to exist three minutes into the future. "In a way, I hope that makes the film and the character more relatable in a way that I don't think we anticipated," Wigutow adds.

The central focus of "Tron: Ares" is Jared Leto's titular character, a Master Program who questions his programming and wishes to join the land of the mortals. If the story sounds familiar, it's because stories about humanizing robots and sentient technology have become pretty popular in recent years (e.g. the "AI girlfriend" trend), and those stories probably wouldn't exist if the original "Tron" hadn't already served as the blueprint. When asking Wigutow if that made things difficult when he was writing "Tron: Ares," because now he had to reckon with how many movies have built off the source material he was drawing from, he tells me that it's a reality he couldn't ignore.

"You want the best story, but those themes, conversations are very much part of the development and the questions of free will versus your genetic coding — in this case, programming — and where does control ultimately come from? Who has control? That's certainly an idea," he says. This too is a fascinating direction to explore AI, not unlike the micro-budget approach of Franklin Ritch's "The Artifice Girl."

"I think the thing that really interested me more, though, and was really more of a guiding light and a kind of torch as we walk through development on this, is what it is that makes someone or something human? How do you define what that is, and can it be that artificial intelligence can teach us something about our own humanity and vice versa?" Wigutow adds.

Whether or not "Tron: Ares" is successful at answering these questions is up for the viewer to decide. The film is currently playing in theaters everywhere.