SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains light spoilers for Tron: Ares. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
Had Tron 3 been made just a couple years after the release of Tron: Legacy, it would probably be a very different movie. Instead of featuring an entirely new plot and cast of characters as Tron: Ares does, one imagines that it would have picked up where the previous sequel left off: with Garrett Hedlund’s Sam Flynn taking control of ENCOM and the world in some way dealing with the existence of Olivia Wilde’s Quorra: the first digitally-created person living in the real world.
The combination of Tron: Legacy‘s reception and time passing led the franchise to go in a different direction with its story instead, and in fairness to Tron: Ares, the new 2025 movie does make some efforts to bridge the gap. An early exposition-filled montage of news reports explains that Sam Flynn opted to leave his position at ENCOM, and a brief moment at the end of the film suggests that Quorra is out in the world somewhere in hiding. The blockbuster also brings us back to locations like Flynn’s Arcade and the original grid, updating the audience on their status. There is, however, one particularly significant detail that is wholly ignored, and I’m not totally clear why it was skipped: what happened to Edward Dillinger Jr.?
For those who don’t recall, the character was featured in the first act of Tron: Legacy, played by now-Oscar winner Cillian Murphy. The son of David Warner’s Edward Dillinger from the original Tron, he is employed as the head of ENCOM’s software design team, and while he doesn’t end up having a significant role to play in the film’s plot, it’s a nice tie back to the 1982 feature that keeps the Dillinger name in play in the canon. Tron: Ares echoes that latter idea by having a member of that particular clan serve as the film’s antagonist, namely Evan Peters’ Julian Dillinger… but it also makes the very strange move of ignoring Edward Dillinger Jr.’s existence entirely.
Plenty is done with the Dillinger name in the film: Julian Dillinger is the son of Gillian Anderson’s Elisabeth Dillinger, the daughter of Edward Dillinger, and Dillinger Systems is created as a rival company to ENCOM. But as the movie makes the effort to explain what’s been going on with the tech dynasty, there isn’t a single mention of Elisabeth’s brother/Julian’s uncle – and as a fan of the franchise, it’s just weird.
I get that Cillian Murphy may have been unavailable and/or uninterested in reprising the role, but totally paving over the character’s existence is a very strange move. He could have been dealt with in the same way as Sam and Quorra (mentioned but kept off to the side in the canon), or the production could have opted for the recasting route (while I certainly don’t want to advocate taking jobs away from Gillian Anderson, it would have been very easy to have Julian be Ed Jr.’s son). Instead, the movie just chooses to forget that he was ever introduced… and the simple consequence of that choice is making fans like me scratch their heads wondering why that decision was made.
This isn’t the only confounding choice that’s made in Tron: Ares (for example, as I note in my CinemaBlend review of the film, in pales in comparison to casting Jared Leto to play one of the main leads), but it nonetheless stands out as one of the stranger calls.