Tron: Ares director explains why Jeff Bridges' Kevin Flynn is the new film's only returning character: "We wanted to take this into a new direction"

Tron: Ares is about to give us the first installment in the sci-fi franchise for 15 years, Jared Leto as a humanoid AI, and much more besides – but the movie won't be giving us any surprise legacy cameos.

Jeff Bridges is the only Tron actor reprising his role for the threequel (making a return as Kevin Flynn), which means there's no comeback for characters like Garrett Hedlund’s Sam Flynn and Cillian Murphy’s Dillinger Jr. There's a reason for that, though – although the team behind the movie slightly differ in what that is.

"These things are not only creative choices; sometimes actors don't want to be in it anymore," director Joachim Rønning says in the new issue of SFX magazine, which features Predator: Badlands on the cover and hits newsstands on Wednesday, September 10.

"There are different ways of looking at that, but I think the story fell into a place where we felt that we didn't need the old characters to be front and centre. We wanted to take this into a new direction while, at the same time, honoring the universe that we’re in."

The movie's titular Ares is Leto's character, a superintelligent artificial intelligence program brought from the digital world to the real one. A host of other new characters will be played by Evan Peters, Greta Lee, Gillian Anderson, and Jodie Turner-Smith.

"We're telling a story that's 14 years later, and the most important thing is that we tell this new story in a way that works," adds producer Justin Springer. "To just throw cameos in, where it's a parade of people that we love from this franchise, I just feel like it's fan service that doesn't serve the story. But we are definitely focused on ways to surprise the audience.

"If we don't touch something in this movie, I always think about where else we can play. I produced the animated series [Tron: Uprising] and I worked on the theme park rides. There are all sorts of different ways to keep the mythology alive, whether that be in a film or a series or whatever, if we're so lucky."

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Tron: Ares releases in theaters on October 10. Read more in the latest issue of SFX magazine, which will be available from Wednesday, September 10. Here's the Predator: Badlands cover you need to be looking out for on newsstands below...