Are Jared Leto’s days as a star numbered? Hollywood is fed up after the failures of ‘Morbius’ and ‘TRON’

So shortly after, when it was still Joseph Kosinski as director, there was talk of a third installment titled TRON: Ascension. A project quite different from the one that has just arrived in theaters today, of which the screenwriter Jesse Wigutow has revealed that “the first version of the script was a different film, but Yes he had a character called Ares”.

The final film, in fact, is titled TRON: Aresbecause that character has “promoted” a total protagonist and everything indicates that it was because Jared Leto He became infatuated with it when he became a producer back in 2017.

Kosinski was left out (and it didn’t go badly, there they are Top Gun: Maverick y F1: The Movie), while Disney placed all its trust in Leto’s vision, who after all was a star and had won the oscar a few years before Dallas Buyers Club. He was also a music celebrity, with his band 30 Seconds to Mars.

So Leto is the protagonist and total driver of TRON: Ares. Whatever happened to the film, he was going to be held responsible. And what has happened is that the film has had an embarrassing failure. He has fared much worse than TRON: Legacy, in fact.

The film finally directed by Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge) has raised 10 million dollars less than expected this weekend, and has barely reached the 60 million internationally. Since the budget was 180 million and the reviews have been very lukewarm, the disaster seems quite predictable.

And Leto has already been identified as the culprit, also due to the ambivalence that his figure aroused before the failure of TRON: Ares. A few months ago it had emerged that up to nine women accused Leto of having had inappropriate behavior with them: the existence of that cult also aroused a lot of concern, Mars Islandwhich Leto leads along with his bandmates.

Only the current situation was calm coinciding with TRON: Aresand in fact Leto participated tirelessly in its promotion, putting himself at the center as the total star and, basically, what he was: the main promoter of the film.

According to Hollywood Reporterthe main consequence of what happened is that the studios no longer trust Leto as a movie star. They do not forget, of course, that in 2022 Leto starred in an even more embarrassing failure than TRON: we mean Morbiusthe vampire film Sony Universe linked to Spider-Man (today closed after the succession of humiliations) that barely made 167 million And on top of that, its reception was surrounded by memes. Memes that caused a desperate re-release by Sony, with the consequent failure.

“In a world where Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor y Benedict Cumberbatch They have difficulty getting leading roles, why resort to a person who is not capable of making a film successful and raises doubts as a person?”, asks a insider from the industry (one who may have forgotten that Fassbender was reported for battering his ex-girlfriend back in 2010).

The future looks bad for Leto, although the truth is that he is already linked to another million-dollar franchise after TRON: Ares.

The plan, then, is for him to play the villain Skeletor in the movie. Masters of the Universe that heads Nicholas Galitzine like He-Man, and that it would hit theaters on June 5 of next year. Aside from this project, a climate of distrust towards Leto seems palpable, although there are also those who do not want to hold him entirely responsible for what happened. Well TRONapart from him, has never been a proven successful franchise either.

“You could have had Ryan Gosling and it still wouldn’t have worked,” says another insiderperhaps remembering when The specialiststarring Gosling, crashed at the box office last year. “Nobody asked for this reboot. If you say ‘TRON: Ares It’s good, we just needed to a different actor‘You’re fooling yourself.’