Let's make this simple: You want to know if there are any post- or mid-credits scenes in Tron: Ares. The answer is yes, there is a mid-credits scene. That scene, along with the film’s “regular” final pre-credits scene, has some pretty big implications for the potential future of the franchise.
Full spoilers for Tron: Ares follow...
The third film in the Tron series, Tron: Ares follows a program, Ares (Jared Leto), who is brought into the real world by his creator, Dillinger Systems’ CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), as the most advanced and powerful among a group of digitally-created super soldiers. Julian is the grandson of Tron’s nefarious Ed Dillinger (played by the late David Warner), and took over as CEO from his mother, Elisabeth (Gillian Anderson), who has a lot of trepidation about her son’s plans. Those plans include increasing profits by selling Ares and his troops to the military, but Julian has a big problem, which is that nothing he brings forth from the Dillinger Systems Grid, including the humanoid programs or their incredible vehicles or weapons, will maintain in our world after 29 minutes.
This 29-minute barrier is a problem shared by Dillinger’s rival, ENCOM, with their digital creations, for which they have much more altruistic intentions. But when Julian learns ENCOM CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee) has found the permanence code created by the legendary Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) that allows these digital beings to stay in the real world without restriction, he orders Ares to get it from her.
Code Breakers
The film’s MacGuffin is the aforementioned permanence code, which Eve first discovers in Alaska at a remote hideaway used by her late sister, Tess (Selene Yun), who died of cancer. In the midst of tons of old floppy disc-held files left by the long-missing Kevin Flynn, Eve finds a copy of the permanence code, overjoyed by what it could mean for the future.
Upon returning to the city, Eve is confronted by Ares and his partner, his fellow warrior program Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), with the duo using Light Cycles to chase her on her own motorcycle. When she’s cornered on a dock, Eve destroys the drive holding the permanence code in order to stop them from getting it, but Julian’s contingency plan is to have Eve herself shot with a laser, sending her into the Dillinger Grid. Eve might not be able to rewrite the code, but having seen it, it’s now stored inside the recesses of her memory. Julian orders Ares and Athena to extract it from her while derezing her, despite knowing this will lead to her permanent death in both the Grid and the real world.
Having seen Julian’s disregard for his fellow programs’ existence and now realizing that he’s even willing to kill other humans to achieve his goals, the increasingly curious and empathetic Ares turns on Julian and helps Eve escape back to the real world, where he does his best to protect her from his former ally, Athena, even as he’s still hindered himself by the 29-minute limit. Ares convinces a wary Eve to help him get the permanence code, promising it will be kept from Dillinger. As Eve has learned, the file Eve found at Tess’ hideaway was a copy; the original can be found in a building she already goes to every day.
Achieving Impermanence
Eve takes Ares to Kevin Flynn’s old office, circa 1989, which was preserved as a display inside ENCOM. There, they find the server where the permanence code is housed, which is inside the original Grid created by Kevin. Ares travels inside the Grid and finds…Tron, as in a Grid that still looks just like the one from the first Tron movie in 1982, old school-looking digital effects included. After encountering a recreation of Bit from the first film and even getting to ride an original era Light Cycle, Ares reaches the tower in this Grid’s center where he is greeted by none other than Kevin Flynn himself; well, sort of.
Tron: Ares doesn’t actually undo Kevin’s death at the end of Tron: Legacy, because this isn’t really a digitized Kevin in the way it was the last time we saw him. When Ares asks this Kevin if he’s alive, Kevin tells him, “I exist in this moment because you do. A reflection of your presence.” (Why this Kevin would look even older than the real Kevin was when he died inside ENCOM’s Grid is a question we’ll leave you to ponder, but we can all appreciate that they just let Jeff Bridges look his real age, right?)
This Kevin is impressed to find that, as a Program, Ares has evolved enough to consider Eve a friend he wishes to help, not to mention that he praises art he appreciates – in this case, the music of his recently discovered favorite band, Depeche Mode – for the “feeling” it gives him, rather than just trying to be clinical about it. Kevin offers Ares the permanence code, though he notes it’s really more of an "impermanence code,” because once it’s put inside Ares, he will be human and eventually die, rather than be able to return over and over in the way a program can.
Ares accepts, and Kevin sends him back to the real world through a backdoor into his own lab – the lab hidden inside Flynn’s Arcade, which is still sitting closed up like it was in Tron: Legacy. And yeah, it’s cool they snuck Flynn’s Arcade into this movie, though someone really should do something with that place; that’s prime real estate!
Meanwhile, Athena returns again to get Eve, and goes big this time, bringing with her one of the giant floating Recognizer vehicles from the Grid. Even Julian, as desperate as he is, knows this would attract far too much attention on the heels of the Light Cycles already seen by the public. That’s when Elisabeth arrives to shut things down entirely, informing Julian she’s taking back the company with the board’s support and that she’s sending Athena back to the Grid. Athena then stabs Elisabeth with her bladed identity disc, killing her. When a distraught Julian asks her why she did this, Athena says she’s simply following Julian’s own orders from earlier to achieve her goals by any means necessary.
The Recognizer flying above the city causes chaos in the streets, with Athena and her fellow soldiers taking down any who oppose them, including fighter jets, as they pursue Eve. As Eve is about to be taken by Athena, Ares shows up to save her, with his suit now lighting up in nifty Tron good guy blue, not bad guy red.
Ares and Athena battle in the street while ENCOM CTO Ajay (Hasan Minhaj) follows Eve’s plan to reverse engineer the Dillinger-created laser that can bring people into the Grid to stop Athena from being able to go back in when her 29 minutes ends. Ajay succeeds just before Athena’s countdown ends; Ares, despite them fighting moments before, holds Athena in his arms as she dies one last time. When she tells him she was following her directive, he tells her he knows she was, though he’s not sure what his own directive is now.
With authorities aware that the attack on the city came from inside Dillinger Systems, cops come to arrest Julian, who gets away at the last moment by sending himself into the Dillinger Grid. Meanwhile, Ares escapes into the night after telling Eve the world and the Grid both need her.
Tron: Legacy’s Legacy
Tron: Ares notably doesn’t directly follow up on Tron: Legacy’s central characters or its ending, which found Kevin Flynn’s son, Sam (Garrett Hedlund) bring Quorra (Olivia Wilde) out of the Grid and into the real world – something we’d never seen happen before in the franchise, but which becomes a frequent event in Tron: Ares.
Still, despite the shift in focus, the film doesn’t ignore that Legacy existed either, mentioning Sam multiple times, including the fact that Eve and Tess first took over ENCOM only after he abruptly resigned for unknown reasons. At one point, as the camera soars through files regarding Kevin Flynn, we also very quickly see a headline that says something about a “Mystery Woman” that likely is about Sam being spotted with Quorra.
And then there’s the film’s ending…
An epilogue lets us know via a news report that Eve has put the permanence code to noble use, allowing ENCOM to make revolutionary advances that include growing crops in climate vulnerable regions, developing new drugs to battle cancer, and more. Standing in her sister’s old Alaska hideaway, now rebuilt at ENCOM, Eve is given a postcard sent by Ares.
We see Ares sitting at an outdoor cafe, now dressed in non-Tron-y clothes for the first time – including a distracting bandana around his neck that screams “Jared Leto probably asked to wear this” – as we hear him write to Eve about the incredible things he’s seen in his travels, and how he wonders what life will be like 100 years from now, and how someone like him might fit in. He says, “I feel like I might not be alone with these questions” as we see him looking at a photo of Sam Flynn and Quorra, and then a second photo of Quorra saying “last seen” with what looks to be coordinates on it. Ares hops on a motorcycle and speeds off, seemingly on a quest to find Tron: Legacy’s main characters; now it’s up to Disney to decide if that story will actually be told!
…Oh, and if it is, will it involve the titular character from the Tron series, or at least his human creator, Alan Bradley? The only time the word “Tron” is even said in Tron: Ares is in regards to the video game Kevin Flynn created with that title, while never referencing the program of the same name that the entire franchise is named after. Granted, Tron did die at the end of Tron: Legacy, but Alan Bradley was certainly alive the last time we saw him, yet he’s never mentioned in Ares either. Hopefully that changes in a potential Tron 4, because this series needs more Bruce Boxleitner!
And hey, let’s not forget Cillian Murphy! Remember his super-quick appearance in Tron: Legacy? He played Ed Dillinger Jr., which means his character would be the baby brother of Gillian Anderson’s recently deceased Elisabeth. Maybe Ed Jr. could pop back up in the aftermath of this family tragedy?
Does Tron: Ares Have a Mid- or Post-Credits Scene?
It sure does have a mid-credits scene, and it’s all about the Dillingers, past and present. We go back inside the Dillinger Systems Grid to which Julian has escaped, within the same tower that Ares, Athena, and their fellow soldiers once occupied. Julian stands in awe looking out at this world he’s never viewed from the inside, when suddenly something rises out of the floor behind him. He turns to see that it’s a red identity disc, but one that looks decidedly old school, like the discs from the original Tron movie.
As he walks towards it, a voice says the word “Sark,” and when Julian grabs the disc, he is suddenly engulfed in energy, beginning to form a red suit and distinctive helmet around him that are unmistakably in the style of the costume worn in 1982’s Tron by the character Sark, the villainous program created by Julian’s grandfather, Ed (Sark was also played by David Warner). As Julian screams, we cut back to the credits.
When IGN’s Tom Jorgensen asked Tron: Ares director Joachim Rønning about this mid-credits scene and what kind of future threat this new Julian-Sark hybrid could represent, Rønning was cautious about the potential for a Tron 4, replying, “Obviously, you never know. The last Tron was 15 years ago. So who knows where we are going to be allowed to go with this. I'm just so happy with every little Tron nugget that we can put into the movie. Little homages, here and there. And obviously this is a big one for potential to where the story can go. I just remember loving the Sark design and all of that from the first film, and seeing Sark, 2025 version, I don't know… Obviously, I never take anything for granted, like where we are going to be allowed to go. If enough people go and see this film and all of that stuff… There's so many variables, because these movies are so expensive to make, but I would love to go there.”
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