Evan Peters, who starred as Quicksilver in Fox’s “X-Men” prequel series and earned acclaim playing Jeffrey Dahmer in Ryan Murphy’s blockbuster “Monster” Netflix miniseries, has joined the cast of Disney’s long-gestating “Tron: Ares,” an individual with knowledge told TheWrap on Wednesday.
Peters will star alongside Jared Leto in the sci-fi threequel helmed by Joachim Rønning, which will hopefully begin shooting in August in Vancouver. Emma Ludbrook, Jeffrey Springer and Leto are producing. Russell Allen is executive producing.
The Walt Disney Company has been trying to make a follow-up to “Tron: Legacy” for over a decade. The first “Tron,” which earned two Academy Award nominations — but none for its then-groundbreaking special effects — earned just $50 million worldwide on a $17 million budget. That was seen as a disappointment in 1982 but built enough of a cult audience for Disney to roll the dice in 2010 with the $170 million budgeted “Tron: Legacy.”
That film, the feature directorial debut of Joseph Kosinski (“Only the Brave,” “Top Gun: Maverick”) was positioned as the year-end fantasy tentpole event film a year after “Avatar,” including 3-D visuals, but earned $170 million domestic and $400 million while earning mixed reviews. It did perform better than Disney’s attempts in the late 2000s/early 2010s — think “Prince of Persia,” “John Carter,” “The Lone Ranger” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” to spawn a boy-centric fantasy franchise in the aftermath of “Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.” It can be argued that Disney’s $4 billion purchase of Marvel in 2009 and Lucasfilm in 2012 filled that void.
The video game-set franchise, both films concern characters who get sucked into a sci-fi video game world and have to fight malevolent forces, is set to evolve in this installment, with Jesse Wigutow and Jack Thorne’s screenplay for “Ares” reportedly focusing on a sentient program played by Leto that crosses over into our world. Sight-unseen, that could be a way to keep the budget in check akin to setting much of Marvel Studios’ first “Thor” on Earth as opposed to the fantastical Asgard.
Whether a “Tron” follow-up could pay off in theatrical revenue in the mid-2020s when films of this size and scale are more par for the course, is an open question. There’s a case to be made that it’s partially about keeping the IP — which has been adapted into animated shows and Disney theme park attractions — alive and ever-present for multimedia exploitation. Joachim Rønning previously co-directed “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” in 2017 and directed “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” in 2019, so he clearly is in the studio’s good graces.
Peters played Quicksilver in “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” “X-Men: Apocalypse” and “Dark Phoenix” while making an in-joke appearance as not-quite-Quicksilver in Marvel’s “WandaVision,” where Peters popped in proclaiming to be her brother (a role played by his former “Kick-Ass” co-star Aaron Taylor-Johnson in “Avengers: Age of Ultron”). While it was the same character in both then-separate universes, the continuity was separate for Fox’s “X-Men” films (where the character was revealed as Magneto’s son) and the MCU universe (where he was Wanda’s bother but in a world with no Magneto).
Along with his superhero work and the “Dahmer” series, he has starred in several seasons of Murphy’s “American Horror Stories” anthology series and won an Outstanding Supporting Actor Emmy starring alongside Kate Winslet in HBO’s well-received “Mare of Easttown.”
Wednesday’s news was first reported in The Hollywood Reporter.
