Lightcycles, Nine Inch Nails Music at Comic-Con

“Tron: Ares” blew the roof off of San Diego Comic-Con at its panel on Friday evening, with an eye-popping, ear-blasting laser-light show set to the pulsing original score by Nine Inch Nails. The panel also included two extended clips from the film, and ended with a NIN music video of the original song “As Alive as You Need Me to Be.”

The movie is third film in one of the more improbable movie franchises in modern Hollywood, which Disney tacitly acknowledged with how it opened its panel, with an extended trailer that covered the events of the previous two films. The first, 1982’s “Tron,” stars Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn, a computer programmer who gets sucked into the computer mainframe know as the Grid. The movie is best known for its groundbreaking use of computer generated imagery for its visual effects, to capture a purely digital world. But “Tron” was far from a blockbuster, grossing roughly $50 million worldwide (unadjusted). The sequel, “Tron: Legacy,” debuted 28 years later, starring Bridges in dual roles as Flynn as an older man and his de-aged digital doppelgänger; it grossed a respectable $410 million globally.

“Tron: Ares” arrives 15 years after “Legacy,” and takes the action outside of the virtual world for the first time, with Jared Leto’s title character playing a digital soldier brought into the real world by Evan Peters’ tech bro character, Julian Dillinger (the namesake of the villain from the 1982 film). Bridges is reprising his role as Flynn, but any more details about his character were left for another day.

The first clip from the film debuted the first lightcycle chase in the movie, in which Dillinger appears to digitally “print” Ares and his compatriot Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), as well as their lightcycles. He then says they have only 30 minutes to find Eve Kim (Greta Lee), who’s left Dillinger’s company, Encom, with a memory stick containing important code. Ares…