“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.
... continue reading