“I have to ride a lightcycle.” That was my first thought last year when the invite arrived to visit the set of Disney’s new sequel, Tron: Ares. It seemed like a logical request. When you think of Tron, you think of lightcycles. They’re a huge part of both 2010’s Tron: Legacy and 1982’s Tron. And yet, I had to wonder, were there even lightcycles in this movie? What exactly WAS this movie? Coming out 15 years after the last one, with basically a whole new cast, it seemed any concept of what the film could or would be was entirely up in the air. I had questions. I wanted answers. And, perhaps, a ride on that lightcycle.
That’s how, on February 20, 2024, I found myself with a group of press at Mammoth Studios outside of Vancouver, BC, Canada, watching day 26 of 76 on the set of Tron: Ares. And, not only was there a lightcycle, there were “lightcycles” plural, and I was actually able to get on the back of one. The same one Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Gillian Anderson, and others will share the screen with, come October 10.
What the heck is Tron: Ares?
Let’s press the rewind button for a second. In 2010, Disney released Tron: Legacy, Joseph Kosinski’s nearly 30 years in the making sequel to the groundbreaking 1982 cult film by Steven Lisberger. Legacy saw Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), go onto the Grid to find his long-missing father and bring back Quora (Olivia Wilde), an artificial being who was created in the digital world. The film ends with Sam and Quora, in the real world, ready to change everything humanity knows about what life actually is.
The team behind Legacy was so confident in the film, before it was even released, work began on a direct sequel that would tell that story. However, after over a decade of trying to get the sequel up and running, it eventually stalled. “We had considered doing a sequel for a long time,” producer Justin Springer said on set. “At some point, it just sort of timed out, and it felt more natural to go with a new story and explore that new story with new characters.”
Plus, in that time, the world had changed. The ideas in Tron: Legacy about people living in a fully digital world, and that world impacting ours, felt a little dated. “[The new story] also allowed us to explore new stories and things that felt a little more contemporary,” Springer said. “Like where the world is with artificial intelligence and technology and 3D printing and synthetic biology. All of these things felt like a good time to move on.”
So Tron: Ares is not a direct sequel to Tron: Legacy, but it happens in that world and won’t break the canon. “The story of Legacy or the original Tron film… [are] still in the foundation of the story we’re telling,” Springer said. So that means, in Ares, Sam and Quora existed. Where they are, what they did, or if that’ll play at all was mostly left a mystery even after hours on set. All that was made clear is that this new story had to be unlike anything we’d seen in a Tron film before.
“If [Tron] was always about looking inside the machine, this movie asks the question, ‘What happens when technology becomes sufficiently advanced that the lines between the two worlds start to blur?’ Springer said. What if “what comes from the digital world could start to exist in our own and be sort of indistinguishable from our reality and even nature in some ways? We explore the interrelationship between the real world and digital world more than we’ve done in other Tron films.”
What’s the story of Tron: Ares?
Tron: Ares centers on two companies, Encom and Dillinger, who are racing to acquire the Permeance Code, the key to making assets born in the digital world of the Grid, a permanent reality. At the start of the film, the technology exists to bring digital assets into our world, but they expire after a certain amount of time. The Permenace Code would change that. Dillinger is led by Jullian Dillinger, played by Evan Peters. He’s the grandson of Ed Dillinger, from the original film, and his company wants this code for military purposes. For profit. Encom, on the other hand, has grander ideas.
Encom, fans will remember, is the company Kevin Flynn took over at the end of the first Tron, and it’s the company his son, Sam, was supposed to take over at the end of Tron: Legacy. However, Ares will reveal that in the 14 years between films, Encom fell on hard times. In fact, it would’ve folded if not for the work of the now CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee). Eve helped reinvent one of Encom’s many classic titles, Space Paranoids, as an online massive multiplayer game in the vein of Fortnite, and it changed everything. Now, she wants to take things to the next level by using the legacy the company was built on, Kevin Flynn’s work on the Grid, and evolving it.
“We are in this era of artificial general intelligence and super sophisticated 3D printing and synthetic biology in a way that will change the way we exist in our world in terms of how we communicate, who we have relationships with how we fight our wars,” Springer said. “That’s really in the zeitgeist of what’s happening right now and… what the Dillingers are up to, what their goals are, and what Eve’s goals are [at Encom] are very much at the center of what a lot of technology companies are thinking about right now… There’s a cautionary tale quality to it, but it’s ultimately thematically optimistic. It’s ultimately saying that in the end, there’s a world in which collaboration between humanity and technology yields a better future.”
In an attempt to defeat Encom in the race for the code, Dillinger creates a program named Ares, played by Jared Leto. Sort of like the character Tron in the original film, Ares is the main man on the Dillinger Grid. He’s joined by a number two, an equally powerful program named Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), and the pair will stop at nothing to do Dillinger’s bidding. Only, somehow, some way, Ares eventually gets wise that he’s on the wrong side of this and ends up teaming with Eve in a story that will not just take place in the real world and the Grid but multiple Grids: the bluer, more naturalistic Encom Grid, a cold, red, scary-looking Dillinger Grid and, most intriguingly, the 1982 Grid that Kevin Flynn visited in the original movie. Yes, at some point, Ares will have to go back to where it all started.
With those pieces in place, we began to see that while Ares isn’t a sequel to Legacy, it certainly is borrowing a lot of what that movie set up. Legacy ended with an Encom CEO and a program from the Grid, together in the real world, ready to change it. Ares has another Encom CEO and another program teaming up in the real world, also potentially changing it.
Jared Leto’s involvement with Tron: Ares
Leto is the star of Tron: Ares and, though he was not on set the day we were there, has been involved with Tron since well before Tron: Ares existed. Springer revealed that during production on Tron: Legacy, Leto asked about appearing in that movie. It didn’t work out, but over the years, he has been at the forefront of trying to will a new Tron movie into existence.
“When we were going to make [a sequel to Legacy called Ascension], he was going to play the villain of the story,” Springer said. “Then the studio decided not to make that movie… but Jared kept knocking on the door of the studio… So when we started a new development phase in 2017, maybe 2018, we started with Jared. He came on to star and to produce with us, and I’ve worked with him on it from the ground up. So it’s different than just going out and hiring an actor and saying, ‘This guy feels right for the part now that we’ve built the whole story.’ He’s really been somebody who’s wanted to be involved in the franchise for a really long time, and we’ve built the story up with him.”
The design and look of Tron: Ares
Our visit to the set of Tron: Ares, for which Disney covered travel and accommodations, began with a look at concept art from various scenes throughout the film. We saw images from Dillinger’s headquarters, which is a massive, NASA-type operation complete with 3D printing technology that can bring Grid objects into the real world for a time. We saw their Grid, Encom’s, the 1980s one, and not just lightcycles, but light skimmers, light jets, and more.
“The theme throughout all these vehicles is man and machine, and seeing how the rider is integrated into these forms really seamlessly,” production designer Darren Gilford said. “So all these ships and all these vehicles, the rider is really kind of intimately woven into the design of these machines.”
The concept art on display also revealed scenes of Ares interacting with the real world, as well as a very intriguing massive head speaking to Ares on the Grid, very reminiscent of the Master Control Program from the original movie. Scenes will also take place at a convention for Space Paranoids fans and, of course, there are multiple scenes of lightcycles, Recognizers, and more in the real world, wreaking havoc across major cities.
Among the coolest pieces of concept art, though, were of the 61st floor on Encom, the heart of the company, which is a room made out of geek dreams. Walls are filled with console arcade machines, beautiful murals of lightcycles and Recognizers surround it, and, at the center, lives a Kevin Flynn museum which is meant to replicate what his office looked like 40+ years ago. We were told that this set was just dressed a few days before and, soon, we got to see it.
Visiting the Grid on the set of Tron: Ares
Before that, though, we went down the long halls of Mammoth Studios to visit two key locations of the Dillinger Grid: the Extraction Room and the Regeneration Room. Both sets are fully to scale and feel wholly immersive. The bright red walls fold around you with white light peeking through from all over. Gilford, who worked on Tron: Legacy too, explained that to really capture the new, red look of this grid, they used stainless steel with a special red film on top. The result was so slick, the set was unusable on day one. “We’d been working on [this set] for weeks in our socks and there was this film on the surface to keep it glossy,” Gilford said. “So the day we come to shoot, we’ve cleaned it, the team’s been here scrubbing it, and the crew shows up… and nobody could stand up. It was so slick all over the place.” They had to spend a Sunday night into Monday making sure the crew could walk around on the set.
The Extraction Room is where we’ll see Eve become the third user ever (after the two Flynn men) to enter the Grid and the first time we see a classic Tron Identity Disc created in the world. Both Eve’s disc, as well as Ares’, have unique looks to the franchise, with hers being more white than not and his being triangular. On set, all the discs are controlled wirelessly with eight different channels of light. Which is undeniably cool to see in action but, apparently, it was the triangular Ares disc that had everyone most excited. “We started with all kinds of shapes and went through it all,” prop manager Dean Eilertson said. “But we just ended up on that one, and it was quite an amazing day when the head of Disney finally saw it and went nuts about it.”
That disc, and Ares himself, will spend time in the Regeneration room, which is basically his office. It’s got the same overwhelming feeling as the Extraction room, but is slightly more personalized, an attempt to show that this program is different from the rest. Case in point, the room is centered around three rather odd sculptures—an almost exploded atom, another that slightly resembles the bytes from the first film, and almost a glass wave sculpture. It was unclear if they’ll be visible or have any prominence in the film.
Kevin Flynn’s office
Nevertheless, details are everything, and nowhere is that more obvious than on that aforementioned 61st floor. When you walk in, you are overwhelmed on your left and right by two giant monuments on either side of you. A veritable art installation of stand-up arcade games, some real, some not, some playable, some not, all stacked on top of each other like something from Q-Bert.
The general workstations for the Encom employees were still under construction, but Flynn’s museum at the center was all but finished. And it’s incredible. It’s like the ultimate homage to retro pop culture with toys, games, LPs, cassettes, and of course, a choice selection of VHS tapes (some highlights include 2001, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Legend, and Krull). There’s a skateboard on the floor, floppy discs on the desk, and all manner of cool knick-knacks in every corner. And, to reiterate, this isn’t for anyone in the movie to use. This is built in the center of the Encom office to remind the in-world employees, and maybe even the cast and crew of Ares, of how they got there: the legacy of Kevin Flynn.
(Also of note, while more recent marketing has made it clear Jeff Bridges returns as Flynn in Tron: Ares, while on set, that was kept a secret. Even in the room with a wall full of cast headshots, we noticed that one had been taken down in advance of our arrival. It was the one belonging to Bridges.)
Real-life hacking in Tron: Ares
Filming, and ultimately the destruction, of the Encon set was scheduled to happen a bit later in the shooting schedule. On day 26, filming was happening in two other locations. Director Joachim Rønning was on one stage filming an “outdoor” scene with Greta Lee, and a second unit was a few blocks away, filming a fight sequence where programs from the Dillinger Grid hack the Encom grid, including a program played by Star Wars video game star Cameron Monaghan. In Tron, hacking isn’t just someone typing into a computer. Those commands start a war.
The second unit stuff was straightforward, but unfathomably cool. While much of Tron: Ares was filmed on large, practical sets or in and around the Pacific Northwest area of Vancouver, sections on the Grids will obviously have a lot of blue screen. And so in a room the size of a gymnasium, we saw red Dillinger Programs beat the crap out of Encom programs (all while wearing fully functioning light-up costumes). The stunt people got punched, kicked, flipped, and more, all in a single take as the camera swoops by on a crane, almost at ground level.
After a few takes on one shot of a single program destroying six others, Monaghan came in and rehearsed a similar scene. He repeated it time and time again to a point where I have no idea how he even has energy, but the press group had to move on with our day before an actual take. (Note: the Star Wars fan in me was fully geeking out at watching Cal Kestis wield different light swords in two hands against a slew of bad guys. Jedi First Order and Survivor movie when?)
A director’s enthusiasm
That level of professionalism and enthusiasm could also be seen with the main unit, too. The scene in question seemed relatively simple: Eve is walking through the snow to grab a large cable to steal power from the Grid, but every detail was accounted for. How much snow was on the hatch, how fast Lee could wipe it off, the position of the cable on her shoulder, and more. Between takes, we were able to briefly chat with Rønning, and his enthusiasm for the project was only equaled by his care. “I think I was hired to try to infuse an emotional core into this, without making it sappy, of course,” he said. “Because it is a hardcore franchise. It’s a darker franchise. It’s probably the darkest franchise for Disney. But I am infusing it with humanity, I feel… This movie is very much about what it takes to be human. Ares wants to be human, and he needs to deserve it and earn it. And that’s important. That’s a big element.”
Rønning started to bring up raw footage he’d shot over the past few days with his main actors. Ares on a lightcycle. Athena on a lightcycle. Characters descending from a massive troop transport. He got so excited about our reactions that he decided to break protocol and show us a massive, massive spoiler, which we swore not to discuss in detail, so I won’t. But the fact that he was excited and confident enough to show something so seismic in the story felt very encouraging.
Finally, the lightcycle
Speaking of seismic, that brings us all the way back to the thing that started all this. The lightcycle. While both the first and second Trons featured lightcycles, in both cases, they were digital effects. A “real” lightcycle had never been built for one of the films, and to do so was a herculean task between Gilford and SPX Supervisor Cam Waldbauer. “Lightcycles are kind of the touchstone of Tron for me,” Gilford said. “The fun of our movie is that this is the Dillinger lightcycle. So we’re going to see kind of this militaristic, brutal version of the lightcycle, which is really fun to design.”
In person, the lightcycle is so perfect it could almost make you cry. It’s a little awkward to get on since you’re riding on your knees, but once you do, it’s fairly comfortable. The design also allows for two modes: a more traditional ride and then a more Tron-inspired flat ride where the rider kind of sinks into the front of the bike. As that happens, the back part rises up over the top, encasing the rider in a pod-like manner. The physical bikes on set don’t actually perform that transformation; it’ll be done by digital effects, but they can be shifted to look either way. Overall, it’s just an incredibly impressive thing to see, something everyone agreed on. “I’ve built a lot of cool stuff, but this is probably the coolest thing we’ve ever built,” Waldbauer said.
Because the tires are large empty circles, there was no way to get the bikes to work in reality. So they’re each mounted on a device that allows a controller to move them back and forth depending on what’s needed for the scene. Ultimately, all of their design and practicality was aimed at putting the bikes onto special rigs with cameras on them so they could be driven through the streets of Vancouver, capturing as much practical footage as possible. The team even developed real-life counterparts to approximate the speed and movement by retrofitting multiple Harley Davidson bikes with large circles of light at each end so the cameras could capture even more real footage.
When it finally happened and I found myself on the back of a real lightcycle, leaning left and right like I was racing on the Grid, I was left with a lot of optimism. The secret name used for filming Tron: Ares was “Velcro” because it was a project that just kept sticking. It never went away. Multiple iterations, multiple directors, everything. It just seemed like a film that was eventually going to be willed into existence.
And so on this day, on set, riding a lightcycle, hearing about the story, seeing the sets, I got the sense that this could be the project that makes Tron the property it always felt destined to be. One of those massive, sci-fi IPs corporations crave. Or maybe it won’t. No one will know for sure until October 10. But even if Tron: Ares doesn’t work, that it brought lightcycles into the real world, in more ways than one, almost feels worth it.