Let’s Talk About the Ending, and End Credits, of ‘Tron: Ares’

Fifteen years ago, the previous Tron movie, Tron: Legacy, ended with an impossibly exciting cliffhanger. Sam Flynn, son of Kevin Flynn, emerged from the Grid having found his father and returning with Quorra, a digitally created being whose mere existence was poised to change the face of history, humanity, the universe, and all of it. Then, nothing happened. The film didn’t get a direct sequel, and it took almost two decades to return to the Grid.

That return happened this weekend with the release of Tron: Ares. Set in a world where those events happened, the story instead follows the new CEO of Encom, Eve Kim, who is in a battle over technology with her rival, CEO of Dillinger Corporation, Julian Dillinger.

In the end, though, well, some of these strands come back to light, so let’s break down what happens at the end and in the end credits of Tron: Ares. Massive spoilers to follow.

If you are still reading, we assume you’ve seen the movie, so we’ll skip over everything to the end. Having found and extracted the Permanence Code from the original Tron grid, Ares can now live his life in our world. After helping Eve defeat the Dillinger programs, Ares has escaped and written to her from Mexico. There, he’s attempting to become more human by seeing the world but, also, is seeking someone out. Ares has photos, as well as a last known location, for Quorra, a being he believes is just like him.

The assumption here is that Ares, a digital being who now exists in the world, is hoping to find Quorra, the only other digital being that exists in the world, to do… we don’t know what. Which, on the one hand, we like. As fans of Tron: Legacy and its ending, it’s nice that Tron: Ares eventually makes its way back to giving those events the resonance they deserve. On the other hand, this is almost the exact same ending as 15 years ago. Newly extracted digital being in the real world, unsure of what the future holds. For 15 years, Disney couldn’t get that story right. Do we really think it can now?

Of course, that’s not the only tease we get at the end of Tron: Ares. In the mid-credits, we pick up with Julian Dillinger on his Grid. It’s been largely destroyed, thanks to the work of the Encom team, but as he looks out, an identity disc emerges. We hear the word “Sark” whispered as Julian grabs the disc and is overtaken with a digital overlay that fans of the original film will find very familiar.

In the original Tron, the program in control of the Grid, the Master Control Program, was in large part personified by its second in command, Sark, who had the same shaped helmet Julian begins to display here. Sark was played by David Warner, who also played Ed Dillinger in the film (and is seen numerous times in paintings in Tron: Ares). Basically, Sark was Dillinger’s digital doppelganger and as evil as they come. Eventually, he was defeated by Flynn and Tron, but (we guess) some of that code remains at Dillinger. And Julian is now in line to become the new MCP of the Grid. One in the image of his powerful, evil grandfather, Ed.

The question then becomes, will either of these storylines ever be paid off? We’ll have to wait and see what happens this weekend at the box office. But, suffice to say, Tron: Ares leaves the world of Tron with some very cool little threads to pick up should we ever return back to the Grid.

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