Robert Downey Jr. still hasn’t settled on his next onscreen outing following the disastrous performance of Dolittle, which went down as the biggest box office bomb of last year and marked a major misstep in his first role outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe since 2014’s drama The Judge.
The actor is now at a crossroads in his career for the second time, then, although the circumstances are exponentially better than they were previously. Downey Jr. can either continue to leverage his serious star power by commanding top dollar for big budget studio blockbusters, or he could look to test his dramatic chops on a more regular basis by signing on to a mix of smaller efforts in different genres.
The Judge is the only movie he’s played a leading role in since debuting as Tony Stark in Iron Man that cost less than $60 million to produce, with eleven of his last fifteen major releases coming armed with budgets of $100 million and above. Of course, the talk of a return to the MCU is never going to go away, but we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones who told us Jared Leto was boarding the franchise long before it was confirmed – that RDJ has had discussions with Disney about a new Tron project, though we can’t confirm which one it is.
Of course, Tron: Ares is already in active development with Leto headlining, but we’re told that there are multiple new adventures in the works and Downey Jr. is in talks for one of them. The brand is hardly recognized as one of the Mouse House’s marquee properties, but a couple of box office hits and some additional star power are all it would take to establish Tron as an important cog in the Disney machine.
