What is Tron Ares’s box office tracking compared to Tron Legacy?
As of August 10, the box office predictions for Tron Ares are, domestically, $42 million to $54 million for its opening weekend and somewhere in the range of $105 million and $145 million overall.
These numbers come from a report by BoxOfficeTheory, though it should be noted that an early analysis from BoxOfficePro has the film earning only $30 million to $40 million in its domestic debut. Tron Legacy opened at $44 million in its opening weekend, so there’s a chance that Tron Ares could still beat its predecessor there. But Tron Legacy also earned a whopping $170 million overall domestically and $228 million at the international box office, so this upcoming sequel has a lot of work to do to reach those numbers.
On the downside, Tron Ares has almost an entirely new cast of characters, with the exception of Jeff Bridges playing some sort of omnipotent spirit that calls Ares a “malfunctioning program” in a July trailer for the movie. Some fans are disappointed that the movie is not a direct sequel to Tron Legacy and has something more like a horror-action story. It’s also been 15 years since the last Tron movie, and some of the scenes for the upcoming film that take place in the real world are unusual given the franchise. While the movie could overtake Tron Legacy’s box office numbers in its debut, there are still questions about whether its performance will be too frontloaded.
And we would be remiss not to mention the troubles surrounding Jared Leto, who in June has denied accusations from multiple women of sexual misconduct, per People.
That said, both reports agree that Tron Ares will likely dominate IMAX and other Premium Large Screen theaters. Before the film’s release, these PLA screens will be showing One Battle After Another on September 26 and a re-release of Avatar: The Way of Water on October 3, both of which are not expected to make anywhere near as much as Tron Ares. So many of them will be switching to Tron Ares in a heartbeat.
On top of that, the rest of the movie release calendar for October 2025 looks fairly wide open with perhaps some competition from Guillermo del Toro’s horror film, The Black Phone 2. But as far as blockbusters are concerned, it’s pretty much the only one between its release and Halloween. We’ve already seen multiple theater chains begin hawking popcorn buckets featuring the red lightcycle that Ares rides in the trailers and a nifty Tron Ares arcade cabinet that is a throwback to Flynn’s Arcade from the original Tron film.
In addition, early pre-sales for the movie are on par with those for Venom: The Last Dance, which is a strong starting point. Its current performance in exhibitor samples have it exceeding Alien Romulus but coming under Sonic the Hedgehog 3. There is also some hype surrounding the soundtrack being produced by Nine Inch Nails, which hopes to live up to the blistering and epic soundtrack for Tron Legacy by Daft Punk.
