
Get ready, users: Tron: Ares is on its way to becoming a reality, and I phrase it that way for a reason. Tron: Ares is poised to make good on the open ending of 2010’s Tron: Legacy with a plot focused on programs from the digital world making their way into the real world.
In early 2024, Disney invited IGN to visit the set of Tron: Ares to share a wealth of details about what a modern Tron movie looks like, and how it attempts to establish an identity (disc) of its very own.
Tron: Ares Is Proud Of Its Legacy… But May Keep It At Arm’s Length
Our set visit began with a roundtable discussion with the film’s producer, Justin Springer, whose involvement with the franchise began as a co-producer on 2010’s Tron: Legacy, and naturally, one of the first questions was about how Ares would continue that film’s story. Reports on the then-untitled Tron 3 had pegged it as more of a reboot, centered around a new program called Ares coming into the real world. That was especially confusing, seeing as, on paper, that sounds like a very logical continuation of the events of Tron: Legacy, which you’ll remember ends with Sam Flynn (son of Jeff Bridges’ Kevin Flynn) bringing the sentient program Quorra back with him into the real world.
Springer essentially confirmed Ares as a soft reboot of Tron, mentioning a feeling on Disney’s part that Ares represented a “good time to move on” from the events of Legacy. But as our set visit continued, and certainly as we learned later in 2024 that Jeff Bridges would indeed return as Kevin Flynn (or whatever biodigital spirit version of him we see in the trailer), that sentiment felt more and more like semantics shmantics. No, it’s safe to say based on what we’ve seen up to this point that Tron: Ares is firmly a sequel to Tron: Legacy, even if the Flynns are no longer the center of attention.
When talking about how Ares, Springer put this into the context of how the Tron series has evolved since 1982, saying that if Tron asked what the inner world of a computer would look like, and Legacy followed that on with considering how that world would evolve in isolation, Ares should be focused on the question of what happens when the lines of the computer world and our own start to blur? Which, hey, when artificial intelligence is dominating the global conversation, feels like an obvious thing to dig into.
Lightcycles Are Practically-Built For The First Time Ever
When it comes to Tron imagery, it doesn’t get more iconic than the lightcycle. The sleek, rounded edges of the originals, and the glassy hardlight trails they leave in their wake, got a serious glow-up in Tron: Legacy. In both of those films, lightcycles were entirely digital creations, but with Tron: Ares all about bringing the digital creations of the Grid into the real world, it was time for lightcycles to shift into another gear.
Along with producer Justin Springer, we spent most of our set visit with Darren Gilford, Tron: Ares’ production designer, who returns from having worked on Legacy. Gilford’s done impressive work over the last twenty years updating the visual language of established IP for the 21st century, and not just for Tron.
Gilford was also the production designer for the Star Wars sequel trilogy, and he designed The Dark Knight’s rad-as-hell Bat-pod motorcycle. He carried that experience directly into Tron: Ares, tasked with creating practical, working lightcycles for the first time so they could be towed on filming rigs for some of the chase scenes we’ve seen represented in trailers and in the footage debuted during the film’s Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con this past summer.
The design of the Ares’s lightcycle is more iterative than evolutionary, hearkening heavily to the Legacy design, and definitely favors cool over comfort. I can be sure of that because each of the journalists in attendance got a chance to mount the thing while it was on its hydraulic rig and yeah, going belly down on a cyberpunk speeder looks a lot cooler than it feels. But hey, the pictures are sweet.
Gilford mentioned the importance of the lightcycle illustrating Tron: Ares’ theme of combining man and machine in its design, and the way you slot into it does evoke a sense of putting on a bike as opposed to getting on a bike. In a world where companies like Meta and Apple are pushing consumers towards wearable AR/VR tech that blurs the line between the digital and the corporeal, it makes a lot of sense for Tron: Ares to be finding ways like this for the action to reinforce those themes.
The Grids
During our walkthroughs with Justin Springer, we saw a lot of storyboards for what’s to come in Tron: Ares (perhaps even a little more than intended…) and one of the most intriguing elements hinted at is how the film will be approaching the idea of “The Grid”, the digital frontier which characters often find themselves rezzed into (never turn your back on a laser in a Tron movie, kids.) Now that we have footage from the trailers to back this up, I think I’m safe saying that there will be multiple Grids in the film.
Before we continue, though, there’s some canon context that may be helpful to reinforce, because Tron and Tron: Legacy’s digital worlds are actually not one and the same. The “grid” in 1982’s Tron is firmly ensconced within ENCOM’s computer intranet. That is to say, the digital world of the original Tron is a closed system under the control of the Master Control Program, an efficiency-focused artificial intelligence visualized as a spinning conical face. After Flynn finds himself zapped into that system, he overthrows the Master Control Program, ostensibly freeing all of the subjugated programs from their pre-determined functions and roles.
Can you imagine if you hit play on your favorite podcast on Spotify and your computer started stress-testing your GPU? Neither could the creatives behind Tron, because it was 1982 and no one was interested in diving that deep into the questions implied by that kind of revolution. The MCP was destroyed, the good guys get proof that Dillinger had stolen the credit for Flynn’s Space Paranoids game; a classic “story over, movie over” ending.
Tron: Legacy drills down on the metaphysical aspects of that ending a little bit more, as we learn Kevin Flynn created his own Grid outside of ENCOM to test the limits of digital creation, tests which eventually lead to the genesis of the ISOs, an immaculately conceived digital race of programs which weren’t written by Users. It’s this Grid which Kevin Flynn, his estranged son Sam, and the ISO Quorra liberate from the reign of Clu, Kevin Flynn’s authoritarian digital avatar. So that’s two Tron movies, each with their own Grid.
Without giving too much away, Tron: Ares seems poised to acknowledge these branching digital realities with at least three separate systems: one belonging to the Dillinger Corporation, one belonging to ENCOM, and one that’s still a bit of a mystery but is sure to get fans of the original Tron aesthetic excited (again, all three of these are represented in the trailer!).
Blending Real and Digital Worlds
The Tron franchise has a reputation of being at the cutting edge of filmmaking technology: the 1982 original is widely considered the first movie to extensively use computer-generated imagery, and Legacy helped pioneer 3D filmmaking in the 21st century, shooting on a custom stereoscopic rig. Legacy is also remembered for being on the bleeding edge of photorealistic digital character design… and a solid reminder of why we use the phrase “bleeding edge.” From a story perspective, the villain Clu being a clone of Jeff Bridges’ Kevin Flynn at his most ambitious makes a ton of sense… but the execution has aged worse than anything else in Tron: Legacy.
As for Ares’ technological raison d’etre, our time on the set didn’t afford us much sense of what that is. Recent comments from Tron: Ares director Joachim Rønning suggest that the film as a whole is the “holy grail of computer graphics”, and the footage we’ve seen so far certainly looks sharp as hell, but the jury’s out on whether or to what degree we can expect any brand-new tech to help bring the story to life.
What was well-represented during our time on set though was that Tron: Ares is using every method under the sun to bring its story to life. Though there was definitely some on-location filming, our set visit was restricted to the soundstages we toured in Vancouver, where we got to watch a scene being shot against the volume digital set technology that’s been rapidly adopted by studios in recent years. That scene was set in the real world, featuring Greta Lee’s Eve Kim at the base of a communications tower, which itself was on top of a snowy mountain. Lee was hauling a long cable over to a console in the tower, so this seemed like it was a piece of a larger action sequence being grabbed.
Cool as the volume may have been to behold though, sometimes the old ways are best. We got to walk through the bridge of Ares’ command ship, a massive red-and-black chamber that definitely communicates the austere power and focus the Dillinger programs wield. After that, Darren Gilford brought us through the set of an executive suite at Encom headquarters, the centerpiece of which was an office walled in on all sides by glass. It belongs (belonged?) to Kevin Flynn, and Encom seems to have preserved it as a monument to their lost president (sometime around the year 1989, according to Gilford).
Flynn’s office is full of easter eggs, like a rolodex I spotted opened to the contact info of Tron’s “user” Alan Bradley… Gilford mentioned my flagging of that may make me the first person to spot an easter egg in Tron: Ares, and if there’s an award for that, I have not seen it come through the mail.
Star Wars: Jedi’s Cameron Monaghan Wields Dual Lightsabers In A Fight Scene
Finally, we also observed a rehearsal for a fight scene that incited a true “holy sh!t” moment for the Star Wars fans among the assembled journalists… and given we’re the nerds that got sent to the new Tron movie set, that was most of us. My colleagues and I were brought onto a blue screen stage where a dozen or so stunt performers were practicing fight choreography for a battle with Caius, a program played by Cameron Monaghan, who our audience may know for his role as Cal Kestis from the Star Wars: Jedi games.
The worlds of Tron and Star Wars collided in a big way when Monaghan walked out onto the stage duel-wielding a pair of lightsaber-esque batons and ready to kick all kinds of ass, with eerie similarity to his Jedi: Survivor character Cal Kestis. It was an especially surreal moment for me: I had just beaten the recently released Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and used the dual wield stance nearly exclusively. Was this some kind of glitch in the system? Had I been digitized into a computer world somewhere along the way? Am I still in the computer right now!?
I hope not, because then I won’t be able to see Tron: Ares when it comes out on October 10th. Are you excited for Tron: Ares? Let me know in the comments, and for more on the movie, check out my reaction to the footage they debuted at San Diego Comic-Con and for everything else, biodigital jazz or otherwise, keep it here on IGN.