Disney announced Tuesday that director Joachim Rønning’s sci-fi feature is set to begin streaming Jan. 7 on Disney+. The latest installment in the Tron franchise hit theaters Oct. 10 and stars Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Gillian Anderson and Jeff Bridges.
Tron: Ares centers on an advanced program known as Ares (Leto) getting sent from the digital Grid into the real world, marking mankind’s first interaction with AI.
The film is the latest offering on the streaming service to be available in IMAX Enhanced, featuring the expanded aspect ratio associated with IMAX programming.
Bridges originated his role as software engineer Kevin Flynn in filmmaker Steven Lisberger’s original 1982 movie Tron and reprised it in director Joseph Kosinski’s 2010 sequel Tron: Legacy that also starred Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde. Both previous movies are currently streaming on Disney+.
In his review of Tron: Ares for The Hollywood Reporter, chief film critic David Rooney wrote that the core story elements were “familiar from countless movies.”
He added, “But a refreshingly subdued performance from Jared Leto as the eponymous program, Ares, supplies an emotional hook and even an occasional touch of humor, something missing from the earlier films. Leto is also well-paired with Greta Lee as Eve Kim, CEO of ENCOM, the tech corporation at the center of the series since the start.”
Title:Tron: Ares Describe This Movie Using One Dragnet Quote: FRIDAY: Reckless endangerment of human life, willful disregard of private property, failure to signal for a lane change. STREEBECK: Yeah, he’s really raking up the violations, isn’t he? FRIDAY: Not him, you. Brief Plot Synopsis: Tech CEO teams up with sentient security program played by Jared Leto … wait, come back! Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 3 Frankenstein’s monsters out of 5.
Tagline: “No going back.” Better Tagline: “Stop trying to make A.I. happen.” Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: ENCOM, the tech/gaming company formerly run by Kevin Flynn, is in a race with Dillinger Systems to obtain something called the Permanence Code, which will allow objects rendered in our world from cyberspace to outlast their current 29-minute lifespan. ENCOM CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee) has the inside track, as the code is hidden in one of Flynn’s old gaming servers. However, rival CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) has a trick up his sleeve: a security program named “Ares” (Jared Leto) that may or may not have more human goals in mind.
“Critical” Analysis: Tron was always a weird choice for a franchise property. The 1982 original — still the most visually arresting movie about intellectual property disputes ever made — was lauded for its special effects*, but otherwise dragged for being a gorgeous snooze-fest. Somehow, director Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick, F1) convinced Disney to make a sequel nearly 30 years later. Tron: Legacy was, like its predecessor, incoherent yet pretty to look at.
Now it’s Joachim Rønning’s turn. Disney kept things in house by bringing on the Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Maleficent director for our latest descent into the Grid. One thing you have to give to Tron: Ares that you couldn’t always say about the first two movies: it isn’t boring.
There are actually lots of things you can say about Ares. For one, Rønning and screenwriter Jesse Wigutow made the decision to set most of the action in the meatspace, where Dillinger (grandson of David Warner’s character from Tron and (presumably) son of Cillian Murphy’s uncredited Ed Jr. in Legacy) wants ENCOM’s code to shore up his pending A.I. contracts with the military. It’s a smart move — considering the groundbreaking F/X of the original were already old hat by 2010 — and helps ground the story.
Or as grounded as a story about sentient code repeatedly violating the First Law of Thermodynamics can be, anyway.
They also steer the protagonist arc mostly away from the Flynns. It’s the worst kept secret outside of Trump being named in the Epstein Files that Jeff Bridges is back in Ares (for maybe 10 minutes) as the virtual Kevin Flynn, but neither hide nor hair is to be seen of Garret Hedlund’s Sam, and that’s fine, really. Instead, we have Greta Lee’s Eve Kim, whose efforts to obtain the “permanence code” are propelled by the memory of her dead sister.
Ares is a pretty blatant attempt to perpetuate the myth that artificial intelligence is good, actually. Kim, in contrast to Dillinger, wants to use the technology’s potential to feed the hungry, help cure illnesses, and mitigate climate change. It would all be very inspiring if our current real world crop of pasty A.I. gurus weren’t singularly hellbent on wiping out lower sector jobs, depleting water reserves, and plagiarizing creatives.
But at the risk of sounding like Homer Simpson, where’s TRON? The names ENCOM and Dillinger are familiar, but Flynn is the only constant throughout all three movies, and his presence here is largely superfluous. The idea of a Grid-like cyberverse is now well-trod territory, and while it’s cool to see light cycles and Recognizers showing up on the streets of San Francisco Vancouver, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Rønning took creator Steven Lisberger’s original “aliens among us” inspiration, swapped out “aliens” for “A.I.,” and affixed a “Tron” label to it.
Your opinions about the previous movies aside (I honestly have almost no memory of Legacy), all three feature kickass soundtracks. Wendy Carlos’ original remains the gold standard, but Daft Punk was one of the only reasons to recommend Tron: Legacy. Here, Nine Inch Nails take over, and aside from the unremarkable “As Alive As You Need Me To Be,” their score absolutely propels the action in Ares.
It’s this same action that sets Ares apart from the first two, which one could charitably describe as “deliberative.” Ares ain’t that, with the Kim/Dillinger maneuvering only giving pause to the spectacle of a freeway light cycle chase or a Recognizer taking on fighter jets (piloted by NIN’s Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, yes really). Gillian Anderson, playing Julian’s mother Elisabeth, even gets in on the action, slapping her son when the scale of his hubris spins out of control.
I’m not even jealous, even though I’ve been longing to be slapped by Anderson for years.
As for the Leto of it all, he’s not bad, even if I can imagine his publicity tour amounting to, “Hi, I’m Jared Leto. Please go see my new movie, but don’t read my Wikipedia entry.” And if Ares is simultaneously a paragon of enlightened self-awareness while also being the baddest dude in virtual *and* physical reality, I’m sure it had nothing to do with Leto’s status as executive producer.
If you’re looking for a nuanced look at the ontological implications of artificial intelligence, I can recommend a few Substacks. Tron: Ares, on the other hand, is entertaining in the same way as an amusement park ride**. It’s loud, visually arresting, and the thrill wears off in minutes. It’s probably the least Tron of all three movies, which might be why it’s my favorite so far.
*Fun fact: Tron was disqualified from the Best Visual Effects Oscar because the Academy viewed using computers as “cheating.” **Ironically, not the the Light Cycle ride at Magic Kingdom, which sucks.
A middle-aged man, wild-eyed and stoned, dives into a beat-up car and fumbles with the ignition, stomping the gas to a soundtrack of squealing tires as he slams the driver’s side door shut while already in motion. His chin-length hair is naturally wavy, or hasn’t seen the right side of a showerhead in a number of days, or maybe both. He’s wrapped in a bathrobe, indoor clothes in a decidedly outdoor environment, and he seems decidedly not up to the dangerous task at hand.
Am I describing Leonardo DiCaprio in the new Paul Thomas Anderson-directed One Battle After Another, or Jeff Bridges as the indelible The Dude in The Big Lebowski? Trick question—it’s both of them.
On the surface, the two movies, released more than a quarter-century apart, may not seem to share much DNA: In One Battle, DiCaprio plays Bob, an ex-revolutionary in hiding, forced off his shabby couch and into the line of fire for the sake of his teenage daughter. In Lebowski, Bridges as The Dude is first out to avenge his pissed-upon rug, then gets swept up, along with his bowling league buddies, in what science would categorize as absolute shenanigans. However, both movies trace the journeys of men (and their jaunty hair accessories) living outside of polite society, forced into action in pursuit of something they hold personally dear (when a rug ties the room together like that, that’s not something you should let go of without a fight), accompanied by an unlikely sidekick with a set of wheels and deep roots in spirituality (John Goodman’s Walter, begrudgingly driving on shabbos, which is certainly not what his buddies in Nam died for, and Benicio del Toro’s delightful Sensei Sergio, always ready with a few road beers and a few grounding words in times of crisis).
But beyond filmic similarities, perhaps Bridges’ career arc can act as something of a roadmap for DiCaprio, with The Dude and Bob, respectively, serving as iconic nexus roles for the two.
Please join me in welcoming Leo to his Dude Era, perhaps the first step to his installment as a respected elder statesman in the leading man club.DiCaprio is currently 50 years old. He’s been on our screens for decades: Just a year before The Big Lebowski’s release, his turn in Titanic had moviegoers the world over contemplating the measurements and buoyancy of wooden doors and experiencing swooning episodes when faced with grand staircases, no matter who was waiting at the top. He’s spent years as a certified leading man, doing the Suit Guy thing in Catch Me If You Can and The Aviator. With Inception, he added twisty psychological intrigue to the mix, pinned it to those lapels, and then in The Revenant he slept in a bear and finally got an Oscar.
Now, it’s time for a new phase of stardom, one with no trace of the Teen Beat heartthrob of yore. No matter what physical shape he’s in, DiCaprio’s characters now have a sense of slight psychic paunchiness, even if they don’t physically have a gut. They are wizened. They might be dads. They’re whiskery. They are, increasingly, at least a little bit unhinged, whether as Don’t Look Up’s astronomy professor-turned-political sellout or One Battle’s perpetually stoned ex-guerilla fighter, or, again…The Revenant.
More than $250 million down, another $530 million to go.
That’s how much of a projected $783 million state budget hole the Colorado legislature filled by the time a special session called to address the impact of the federal tax bill ended Tuesday afternoon — and the larger amount that still remains. Erasing the rest of the red ink will fall to Gov. Jared Polis, who plans to rebalance this year’s budget in the coming days through a mix of cuts to state funding and a big dip into the rainy-day fund.
Over six days, the legislature’s majority Democrats fulfilled their part of a plan worked out with the governor’s office: to pass legislation that is expected to generate enough revenue to close about a third of the shortfall projected for the state’s budget in the current fiscal year, which began July 1. They ended tax breaks and found other ways to offset declining state income tax revenue, while leaving spending cuts largely for Polis to decide.
“What we did here in this special session is soften the blow,” said Sen. Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat who chairs the legislature’s budget committee. “But when the federal government cuts $1.2 billion in revenue from the state with a stroke of a pen, after we’ve already cut $1.2 billion (from the budget) in the regular session, that’s a tough deficit to come back from in a way that doesn’t impact the people of Colorado.”
The special session ended with 11 bills going to Polis for final approval. Five sought to fill the budget gap, largely by ending tax incentives for businesses and high-income earners.
The single largest revenue-raising measure, House Bill 1004, will auction off tax credits that can be claimed in future tax years for a discount. Backers expected that bill to bring in an additional $100 million to state coffers this year, at the expense of about $125 million in future years.
Together, those measures add up to $253 million in revenue to reduce the projected deficit — money that Democrats say represents averted cuts to Medicaid, schools and hospitals.
“Colorado legislators stepped up and helped protect children’s food access and minimized the devastating cost increases to health insurance premiums across the state, to the best of our ability,” Polis, who signed two of the new bills earlier Tuesday, said in a statement.
The legislature’s Joint Budget Committee expects to meet Thursday to hear Polis’ plan to address the remaining $500 million or so, including mid-year spending cuts.
As part of his call for a special session on Aug. 6, Polis announced a statewide hiring freeze. He said in an interview before the session started that he hoped to avoid cuts to K-12 education, but he has left all other options on the table, including Medicaid program spending.
The plan also factors in a significant use of reserves to offset some of the remaining gap.
Partisan debates
Over the past week, Republicans fought the Democrats’ bills, but strong Democratic majorities in both legislative chambers all but preordained the outcome.
“Not only did we increase taxes, we’re balancing the budget on the back of small businesses,” said Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Brighton Republican on the budget committee.
One of the bills heading to Polis would erase a fee paid by the state to businesses for collecting sales taxes — an outdated subsidy, according to Democrats, and an unnecessary new burden now put on businesses, according to Republicans.
Republicans said before the session that they’d likely challenge several bills in court over allegations that they violate provisions in the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights that require voter approval for tax increases. Kirkmeyer and Rep. Rick Taggart, a Grand Junction Republican who’s also on the budget committee, said bills going to the governor that would eliminate some tax credits and allow the sale of tax credits against future collections seemed particularly vulnerable to a challenge under TABOR.
Debate throughout the special session took a distinctly partisan edge. Democrats laid the cuts on congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump and called the federal tax bill a de facto theft of benefits from the poorest Coloradans to benefit the wealthiest.
Republicans countered that the federal bill delivered much-needed tax cuts, and they said Democrats sought to yank those away instead of cutting partisan priorities.
Legislators begin to gather in the Senate Chambers before the start of another day of the special legislative session at the Colorado State Capitol in Denver on Aug. 26, 2025. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)
Bills on wolves, artificial intelligence
Other bills passed sought to respond to different aspects of the federal bill, formerly known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” as well as other priorities.
Lawmakers stripped general fund money away from the voter-approved program to reintroduce wolves in the state, though releases are expected to continue this winter. They tweaked ballot language for a measure about taxes for universal school meals to allow that money to go to general food assistance, as well, if voters approve it in November.
The legislature also approved a bill allowing state Medicaid program to pay Planned Parenthood for services provided, after the federal government specifically barred federal money from going to the organization.
Polis included in his call of the session that lawmakers address concerns swirling around the state’s first-in-the-nation regulations of artificial intelligence after a similar effort in the spring blew up. The rules now in law go into effect in February.
After days of bruising negotiations, lawmakers punted on any new changes and delayed the existing rules from going into effect until the end of June — giving them time to resume the debate during the next regular legislative session in January.
Jared Leto is known for his method-acting ways when working on films, and that extends to the recently finished Tron: Ares, according to co-star Jeff Bridges.
Speaking during an appearance on SiriusXM’s Literally! With Rob Lowe, Bridges talked about meeting Leto for the first time, and how he was told that Leto was already going by his character — Ares — name instead of his own.
What did Bridges say about Leto’s method acting?
“I hadn’t met him before. I’m saying, ‘What’s it gonna be like?’ because he was also a producer of the show, big fan of the original, working on it for 10 years. I came in, and you know how each set has a different vibe?” Bridges said. “There was an interesting vibe on this. I said, ‘How’s Jared? How’s he working?’ ‘He’s all right. You know, we call him Ares, you know, so he goes by his name,’ and I said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’”
Alongside Leto and Bridges (the latter of whom is reprising his role as Kevin Flynn), Tron: Ares also stars Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Hasan Minhaj, Jodie Turner-Smith, Arturo Castro, Cameron Monaghan, Gillian Anderson, and Sarah Desjardins.
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Tron: Ares will be the third official feature film in Disney’s Tron franchise following 1982’s Tron and 2010’s Tron: Legacy. The film is directed by Joachim Rønning, who previously made 2019’s Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and 2024’s Young Woman and the Sea. He also co-directed 2017’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales with Espen Sandberg.
Production on the new Tron movie officially wrapped in May 2024. Rønning wrote in an Instagram post at the time, “Thanks to an incredible and tireless crew, I really believe we pushed the filmmaking limits on this movie. Even through six weeks of night shoots you never slowed down. Also, a big thank you to our wonderful cast for leaving everything on screen. I can’t wait to show the world what we’ve done.”
Tron: Ares will be released in United States theaters and IMAX on October 10, 2025, from Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
Jared Leto‘s Method acting ways on everything from Suicide Squad to Morbius have generated so much attention that when Jeff Bridges reported for work on Tron: Ares, he didn’t quite know what to expect.
“I hadn’t met him before. I’m saying, ‘What’s it gonna be like?’ because he was also a producer of the show, big fan of the original, working on it for 10 years. I came in, and you know how each set has a different vibe?” Bridges asked Rob Lowe during an appearance on his podcast series, SiriusXM’s Literally! With Rob Lowe. “There was an interesting vibe on this. I said, ‘How’s Jared? How’s he working?’ ‘He’s all right. You know, we call him Ares, you know, so he goes by his name,’ and I said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’”
The Disney tentpole — a follow-up to the 1982 seminal science-fiction film Tron and the 2010 sequel, Tron: Legacy — stars Leto as Ares, a computer program sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission to introduce artificial intelligence beings to humans. Bridges has been a part of the entire franchise by playing video game designer Kevin Flynn. Tron: Ares, directed by Maleficent: Mistress of Evil’s Joachim Ronning, features a cast that also includes Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Hasan Minhaj, Jodie Turner-Smith, Arturo Castro, Cameron Monaghan and Gillian Anderson.
The subject of Method acting came up as Lowe detailed what he’s like on set and how it’s similar to Bridges’ approach. “You, I know, are like me of the school of actor where we show up and do it. There’s not a lot of artifice around the edges. We’ve done whatever work we need to do, we’re doing it in the quiet of our own privacy, so I can go and be Rob, and we can talk about the Lakers or whatever, and they can say, ‘five minutes,’ and we come to the set, and we do it, and then when they cut, we go, ‘Hey, you know, I went to a great Mexican restaurant last night,’” he explained. “Then, there’s Jared Leto, who, you know, when Jared played the Joker, I have a friend who played his best friend. He was Mr. J the whole time.”
Bridges continued the thought by saying that both ways of doing it can “work beautifully,” though when he showed up on Tron: Ares, he wasn’t sure how to play it. “His name was Ares in the show, and I ended up going, ‘Hey Air, what’s happening man?’” he explained. “And I say, ‘Is it OK if I call you Air?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, sure you can.’ Then we got loose, and it was just wonderful. I mean, we jammed, you know?”
He nodded to the music in the film, prompting Lowe to confirm that Leto’s character is also a rockstar. “Big rockstar, man,” he confirmed. “I won’t tell you ’cause we get into some music stuff in the show, and it’s quite good. He’s wonderful in the part though, and I’m so happy to be a part [of it].”
Playing a rockstar isn’t that much of a stretch for Leto, the longtime frontman of Thirty Seconds to Mars. The band kicked off its Seasons Tour earlier this year, on March 14, in Santiago, Chile, at Lollapalooza. Dates continue through the end of the year before wrapping in Dubai on Dec. 12. Most recently, they just finished a series of shows in Australia before performing in Singapore this weekend.
Tron: Ares is due for release on Oct. 10, 2025. Bridges joined Leto, Lee and Peters onstage at D23 last month to tease what’s to come. “Technology and AI is omnipresent in our lives,” Bridges offered during his remarks. “What a perfect time to revisit this world. Or, have this world visit us, because that’s what happens in this movie.”
Jeff Bridges, Greta Lee, Evan Peters and Jared Leto appear at D23 in Anaheim, Calif., on Aug. 9, 2024.
Seabiscuit is a captivating sports film that takes us back to the early 20th century, a time when America was transitioning into the automobile age. The storyline is centered around three men who come together to train Seabiscuit, a Thoroughbred yet undersized racehorse. Overcoming several obstacles, they help him become one of the most victorious racehorses in history.
Here’s how you can watch and stream Seabiscuit via streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video.
Is Seabiscuit available to watch via streaming?
Yes, Seabiscuit is available to watch via streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
After losing his young son in an accident, car dealer Howard meets and marries Marcela Zabala. Together, they venture into the world of horse racing. The story then introduces us to John “Red” Pollard, whose life takes a turn when he is sent to live with a horse trainer and eventually becomes a jockey. However, his career is jeopardized when an amateur boxing match leaves him blind in one eye. Howard and Pollard’s paths cross when the former acquires a stable of racehorses and hires Tom Smith as his trainer.
Smith convinces Howard to buy Seabiscuit, a small, lazy, and unmanageable colt. Despite these traits, Smith sees potential in him and hires Pollard as his jockey. Under Smith’s innovative training, Seabiscuit beautifully transforms into a successful racehorse, becoming a beacon of hope for the public during the Great Depression.
Produced, written, and directed by Gary Ross, the movie a testament to the power of determination, friendship, and the will to overcome adversity. It’s a story that continues to inspire and captivate audiences, reminding us that sometimes, the most unlikely heroes can have the biggest impact.
Seabiscuit features Tobey Maguire portraying John “Red” Pollard, Jeff Bridges as Charles S. Howard, Chris Cooper in the role of Tom Smith, Elizabeth Banks as Marcela Zabala-Howard, Gary Stevens playing George Woolf, and William H. Macy as “Tick Tock” McLaughlin.
Watch Seabiscuit streaming via Amazon Prime Video
Seabiscuit is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video. It is a video streaming service operated by Amazon. An Amazon Prime subscription includes Prime Video perks. Amazon Prime Video features exclusive material including Amazon Original Shows.
You can watch via Amazon Prime Video by following these steps:
$14.99 per month or $139 per year with an Amazon Prime membership
$8.99 per month for a standalone Prime Video membership
Amazon Prime is the online retailer’s paid service that provides fast shipping and exclusive sales on products, so the membership that includes both this service and Prime Video is the company’s most popular offering. However, you can also opt to subscribe to Prime Video separately.
The Seabiscuit synopsis is as follows:
“True story of the undersized Depression-era racehorse whose victories lifted not only the spirits of the team behind it but also those of their nation.”
NOTE: The streaming services listed above are subject to change. The information provided was correct at the time of writing.
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Few actors ever reach the Academy Awards, let alone before hitting the legal driving age. But that was exactly where Hailee Steinfeld found herself when she earned a best supporting actress Oscar nomination for the Coen brothers’ True Grit in 2011 at age 14.
“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Take it all in,” people once advised Steinfeld, now 26, as she tells People in her new cover story. “Of course, at 13, I was like, ‘Yeah, absolutely. For sure. I’m taking it all in.’ And while I do feel like I remember just about everything, I only now realize what people meant by that,” she continues. “It was such a rare experience, everything about it: the timing, the places I got to go to and the people I got to work with. I was experiencing so many firsts, and I was surrounded by the best people that really took me under their wings and guided me every step of the way. I just remember being young and curious and so overexcited about absolutely everything.”
Her True Grit co-star Jeff Bridges has been a particularly major influence, both professionally and personally. “Jeff has so much fun with what he does,” Steinfeld said. “With True Grit, I had a lot of dialogue, and the circumstances weren’t always smiley and bubbly. Yet somehow, in between takes, he managed to keep up an energy that made me feel so at ease and comfortable… If we had 10 minutes in between takes, he would pull out this game called Pass the Pigs, which became a crowd favorite very quickly with the Steinfeld family.”
Although the actor says she “had moments of [feeling like I was missing out] when friends would send me pictures from winter formals and proms and homecomings,” she still had a chance to experience some typical teenage milestones—by filming a homecoming scene on 2015’s Barely Lethal and joining a sorority in the Pitch Perfect franchise. Plus, 2016’s The Edge of Seventeen allowed Steinfeld to “let a little bit of teen angst go that I didn’t even know I had.”
In recent months, Steinfeld has been touched by the personal battles both Bridges, who is currently in remission for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and her Hawkeye co-star Jeremy Renner, who survived a near-fatal snowplow accident, have endured. “I haven’t really talked about it, but it is a weird thing because I would be so moved by what has happened to them in any other case, and here I am lucky enough to have a personal connection,” she tells the outlet. “I’m just so beyond grateful that they’re both here.”
The “Old Man” star, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in October 2020, was undergoing chemotherapy when he contracted the coronavirus — and the 73-year-old is candid about how one affected the other.
“I got this letter from the chemo place informing me I had contracted COVID,” Bridges told AARP The Magazine in an interview published Tuesday. “I had no immune system left to fight it. Chemo had wiped that out, which made it really, really tough.”
“For me,” he continued, “cancer was nothing compared to the COVID.”
Bridges had COVID while also dealing with a 9-by-12-inch tumor in his body. The actor told AARP he contemplated his own death at the time and was convinced he’d never work again — until recovery led him from “we’ll see” to “maybe.”
It was ultimately his wife, Susan Gaston, who helped him get back on his feet.
“My wife Sue was my absolute champion,” Bridges told the outlet about his partner of more than 45 years. “She really fought to keep me off a ventilator. I didn’t want to be on it, and the doctors didn’t necessarily want that. But Sue was adamant.”
Hospitals seized on ventilators in the early days of the pandemic to help COVID-19 patients breathe. Studies began to suggest mechanical ventilation could be leading to a higher death rate, however, perhaps due to the risk of bacterial infection or lung inflammation.
Bridges told AARP he had been “doing those fight scenes” in “The Old Man” without even knowing about his cancer — which has since shrunk “to the size of a marble.” While he announced in September 2021 that he was in remission, the journey was far from easy.
“A lot of getting better was a matter of setting really small goals,” he told the outlet.
“At first, they’d say, ‘How long can you stand?’ For a while, my record was 45 seconds before I’d collapse,” he continued. “And then they were saying: ‘Oh, look, you’re standing for a minute! That’s so cool. Now can you walk 5 feet?’”
Bridges contracted COVID-19 a second time last year but said “it wasn’t nearly as bad as the first go-around.” The actor, who was hospitalized during production of the first season of “The Old Man,” is set to start filming the second — and couldn’t be happier.
“Doing what you do, that invigorates you, and you feel great,” he told AARP. “And I’m so blessed to have this cast … you know, that fueled my health, too, I think.”
As if there was ever any doubt that he would, Jeff Bridges abides.
The 72-year-old actor has had a difficult few years health-wise, but appears to be on the mend after serious situations with both cancer and a near-fatal case of COVID-19. In a new interview with AARP: The Magazine, Bridges revealed that the mass in his stomach when he was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in March 2020 measured a whopping 9 by 12 inches. Now, he says, it’s been reduced to “the size of a marble.”
He’s worked hard at recovery, utilizing multiple types of chemotherapy, as well as working with a trainer to film the second season of his show The Old Man and walk his daughter down the aisle at her 2021 wedding and dance with her at the reception.
A 2021 tangle with COVID-19 proved to be nearly fatal.
“For me, cancer was nothing compared to the COVID,” he told AARP. The chemotherapy wiped out his immune system, a disaster when he found out he’d contracted COVID-19.
“I remember the doctor saying to me, ‘Jeff, you’ve got to fight. You’re not fighting.’ But I didn’t get it anymore. I just didn’t know how to do that. I was in surrender mode. I’d say to myself, ‘Everybody dies, and this is me dying.’ And I’d hear myself go, ‘Oh, well, here we are, on to the next adventure.’ ”
He calls his wife, Sue, “my absolute champion.” After she beat her own 2021 case of COVID-19, she returned to the hospital to advocate for Bridges and keep him off the ventilator.
He also says meditation and positive thinking have been absolutely essential in not his work, but keeping him alive and getting up to face every day.
“I sometimes just wake up and say, ‘Oh God, I gotta do it again. I gotta get up and do all this stuff I don’t want to do,’” he said. “Fortunately, we’re all so creative, telling ourselves stories about why we feel all that. ‘That’s why I feel bad. And, oh yeah, I forgot about that one.’ And it just rolls on while you’re lying there in bed, and then you get up and get going.”
The Big Lebowski is certainly a modern classic, so it’s exciting to hear that Jeff Bridges would come back to do a sequel if the opportunity arose. The absurd comedy has become beloved by many and quoted endlessly. Perhaps that’s because it’s not so often we see such an unflappable character beset by such high stakes. Perhaps it’s just because “The Dude” is an iconic character. Either way, if the original team was on board, we can’t really see any way it could go wrong.
“If the brothers were involved,” he explained, “I certainly would. The [Coen] brothers, they’re mysterious and full of surprises. You don’t know what they’re going to do, so since they’re surprising, I don’t think they’ll make a sequel. But like I say, they’re surprising, so maybe they’ll surprise me and make a sequel.”
Athough the Coens never made a Big Lebowski sequel, there was a spinoff to the movie a few years ago. 2019’s The Jesus Rollsfollowed John Turturro’s Jesus Quintana on his own strange adventure. The Coens were not involved in the film, which Turturro wrote and directed (with the Coens’ blessing). And in fact, the Coens have never made a sequel to any of their movies, and the brothers are currently each working separately on their own projects. All of that suggests a Bigger Lebowski film would be the longest of long shots.
As for the enduring popularity of the original, Bridges told People “movies are kind of like your children — they put it all in perspective. They let you know how fast it’s going, because before you know it you’ve got a six-month-old, and then you turn around and she’s 16. Movies are kind of like that. That movie, I’m so proud to be a part of that movie. What a good one.”
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It’s hard to always predict which movies are going to live on as classics. While you might assume something like Star Wars was always destined for greatness, the truth is that you never really know which movies are bound to become pop culture touchstones. The actors in these movies don’t know, either — what starts off as a one-time movie deal might turn into a lucrative franchise run. In other cases, a movie sequel or reboot may lie dormant for several years, and when it finally does happen? Those actors prepare to return to a role they haven’t touched in decades.
Since Hollywood can be so unpredictable, it’s never quite clear what the future holds for a movie franchise. In some situations, a franchise completely starts fresh with new characters. This creates the opportunity for the original actors to come back and make a cameo. There are some movies, however, where those original actors serve as the leads of that sequel — a good example would be Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels as Harry and Lloyd in 2014’s Dumb and Dumber To. There’s something undeniably special about seeing an actor reappear as a certain character so many years — even though they may look a bit older, they still bring the same energy to the table.
For some performers, one iconic role becomes the gift that keeps on giving. No matter how much time goes by, that character will always be a defining part of their career. These actors returned to their roles decades after their first appearance on screen.
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