Set Visit Report: Exploring the New Grids and AI Future of TRON: Ares

For more than four decades, Tron has imagined what happens when humans and machines collide. The 1982 original asked what a digital world inside a computer might look like. TRON: Legacy (2010) explored how that world evolved in isolation. Now, after 15 years away, Disney finally returns to the Grid with TRON: Ares, and the story has never felt more relevant. In an era dominated by artificial intelligence and questions of what separates the real from the virtual, the franchise once again feels ahead of its time.

I had the opportunity to see this evolution up close on February 20, 2024, when I traveled to Vancouver for day 26 of 76 of production. Internally, the movie was still being referred to under its codename “VELCRO.” It was not only my first time stepping onto a TRON set and inside a Grid, but it was also Disney’s first film set visit since the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a longtime fan of the franchise who was at San Diego Comic-Con each year that director Joseph Koskinski came to pitch the concept of a modern TRON, later recording sound of us in the crowd to use in the sequel, and showcasing it, this was special.

We spent much of our time on the TRON: Ares sets - which were massive and built practically - and in "war room" with producer Justin Springer who framed it best during our visit: “This movie sort of asked the question, what happens when technology becomes sufficiently advanced that the lines between the two worlds start to blur, and what comes from the digital world could start to exist in our own…”

TRON: Ares Brings the Grid Into the Real World

The first two TRON movies pulled audiences into the machine. Ares flips that premise, bringing programs and vehicles into reality itself. “If Tron was always about looking inside the machine, this movie asks what happens when assets from that world start entering our own,” Springer explained.

That's not to say we won't be visiting the grid. In TRON: Ares, we'll be visiting at least three Grids that I know about, but more on that later...

At the heart of the story is the “permanence code,” a piece of elusive programming that could allow digital matter to remain stable in the real world. It is the key to everything and everybody wants it, which is where the iconic TRON corporate element come in. Production Designer Darren Gilford described how Eve (Greta Lee), our human protagonist for TRON 3, experiments with this in her mountain lab: “It’s meant to play the top of the mountains in a very remote location… she’s produced an orange tree. It’s possible to produce them before, but typically something so complex only lasts 29 minutes, and then it sort of derez into nothing.”

The mountain sequence is one of a few parts of the TRON: Ares production that uses the volume. As much as Director Joachim Rønning did not want to use this technology, citing having "mixed emotions a little bit about it, because it's also limiting" it was not feasible on the timeline to send crews literally up snowy mountains, so they constructed a set, featuring fake snow, and utilized the volume for the digital background and to make the actors feel like they are there.

Director Joachim Rønning added that the realism extends to vehicles: “A lightcycle in the real world is more like a Formula One car… it can’t go up stairs. That’s where Eve, on her Ducati DesertX, can escape,” referring to some of the real-world chase sequences that involved the production making real lightcycles where TRON: Legacy didn't have any. All the cool Legacy lightcycles all those years ago were craft just for the marketing campaign.

Ares and Athena: TRON’s First Contact With AI

Vehicles are not the only things breaking into our world. TRON: Ares is also introducing programs that step out of the digital realm for the first time.

Jared Leto’s titular Ares represents the next leap for the series: a program printed into the real world. Springer positioned Ares as something more profound than a digital soldier: “He becomes the protagonist of the movie… a program who finds his way into our world and ultimately decides he no longer is interested in the directive that was given to him, but would like to sort of be more self-determined.”