And so, the book closes on Tron: Ares. After an unfortunate stint at the box office and a rapid-fire release as a PVOD, what is likely to be the film’s best chance at finding an audience—long after it needed to to keep the Tron franchise from going into hibernation for the foreseeable future—will arrive next week when Ares uploads itself to Disney+.
Just a couple of months on from hitting theaters, today Disney confirmed that the third Tron film will hit Disney+ next week on January 7, a day after the film makes its physical debut on Blu-ray.
To be fair to Ares, it’s probably much more likely to find a more willing audience on Disney+ than it was in theaters or on digital, where you were directly paying for it. Sure, you’re still paying for Disney+, but you’re paying that for the whole platform, not just one movie. It’s the place that’s got Andor season two *and* Tron: Ares in a week’s time. It’s a streaming service with giddy highs and dizzying lows! A streaming service with multitudes.
And that might be what Tron needs right now, even if Ares ended up being so divisive among critics and audiences alike. If the film finds an audience on streaming—and Disney is already kind of admitting to itself that Tron‘s future as a theatrical endeavor is on hold after Ares at the moment—it might at least be a sign to the studio that maybe the franchise should make that its home for the future. After all, Legacy did give us the excellent, but short-lived, Tron: Uprising animated show as a brief stopgap in the long wait between films.
But that might be a big if regardless. Even moderate box office success didn’t stop the waits between Tron films from being anything less than decades, so after Ares failed to even reach some of the conservative estimates made for its potential success, we might just see Disney unplug from the Grid altogether. Unless it decides to use a few faceless programs for its OpenAI slop era plans. That would be a grimmer fate for the franchise.
All that’s to say that Tron: Ares hits Disney+ on January 7, 2026. Watch it, or don’t?
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