A new film in the saga Tron arrived. The filming of Tron: AresOr Tr3nbegan in January 2024. Date, story, casting: this is what you need to remember and what we know today about this feature film.
The Tron saga is expanding: after a first film in 1982, then a sequel in 2010 (Tron: Legacy), a third feature film is now on track. Tron AresOr Tr3n, will immerse spectators back into cyberspace, with artificial intelligence at the heart of the concerns. Joachim Rønning is at the helm. The casting is completely new.
What does the story tell of Tron ?
In the movie Tron, we follow the adventures of a computer programmer, Kevin Flynn (played by Jeff Bridges), facing the president of the company Encom, in which he is employed. Indeed, the games that Kevin Flynn designs are taken over by the CEO, Ed Dillinger (played by David Warner), who takes credit for them before firing the real developer.
Eager to restore the truth, Kevin Flynn seeks to enter the Encom company network. But in this attempt, which will lead him to enter the company, he finds himself transported involuntarily into cyberspace: he momentarily leaves his fleshly envelope, made of atoms, for a digital representation, composed of bits.
Tron: Legacy is the sequel to the first film, which this time centers on Flynn’s son, Sam (played by Garrett Hedlund). The principle stays the same. Twenty years later, Sam finds himself immersed in cyberspace and finds his father (still Jeff Bridges), stuck there. The two will then have to team up to solve the problem.
In this second film, the problem lies in a falling out between Flynn and his digital double CLU (“Codified Likeness Utility”). Their vision, in fact, diverges on how to perfect the digital system in which they operate. But the arrival of Sam will offer an opportunity for Flynn to make up for his mistakes and the excesses of CLU.
Tron: Ares is it a direct sequel to Tron: Legacy ?
The status of Tron: Ares compared to the previous two films turned out to be unclear. It was sometimes presented as a sequel, sometimes as a reboot. The latest developments list it more as a sequel, but there are no characters from the main cast of Tron: Legacy formalized as of January 2024.
This uncertainty is reflected among our colleagues. Collider talks about it as a sequel in its January 19 news. Inverse, on the other hand, is more cautious. “ This doesn’t feel like a direct sequel », writes the site, pointing out a distribution that is completely new for the moment. But perhaps there will be surprises.
When does filming start? Tr3n ?
Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Rønning made the start of filming official on January 19, 2024 on his Twitter account. Tron: Ares is also presented with stylized writing Tr3n. Previously, the director had shared other progress points, without revealing much. It was at the beginning of 2023 that his participation materialized.
Production was planned to begin earlier, in 2023, but the schedule was delayed due to the major social unrest that hit Hollywood last summer. Audiovisual professionals, particularly screenwriters, actors and actresses, have spoken out against the effects of a sector in full upheaval with AI and streaming.
When comes out Tron: Ares ?
No release date Tr3n has not been made official. Presumably, we should not expect a cinema release before at least 2025, time to complete filming, complete all post-production, carry out possible reshoots and prepare the marketing steamroller. And that, if everything goes well on set, obviously.
Where to watch the film on streaming sites?
Tron: Ares will arrive on the Disney+ SVOD platform, because the license rights are owned by the entertainment giant. In France, Tron 3 will take time to release on streaming after the theatrical release, due to media timelines. Unless it is reformed by then, a minimum period of six months must be observed.
What will tell Tron 3 ?
The details are not yet known, but according to Joachim Rønning, it must be a film that deals with artificial intelligence and what it means, and implies, to be human. If the notion of AI is omnipresent today, it already permeated the storyline of the two previous films, with very advanced systems.
What casting?
Jared Leto was attached to the project very early on, as he is also producing the film. Evan Peters (X-Men, Dahmer), Greta Lee (Russian Doll), Jodie Turner-Smith (White Noise, The Acolyte), Cameron Monaghan (Shattered, Jedi Fallen Order, Jedi Survivor), Sarah Desjardins (Impulse, The Night Agent) and Gillian Anderson (X-Files, Sex Education) have been made official.
Actors and actresses who participated in Tron (like Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner) and Tron: Legacy (Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde) have not been announced.
Why Tron has had such an impact on sci-fi and pop culture
As we explained in an article in 2016, this film, without directly evoking the Internet, develops a completely new visual language supposed to represent the interior of a computer system with luminous printed circuits which resemble highways and programs obliged to fight in deadly video games.
This representation, which appears as a UFO in the world of science fiction (Tron dates from 1982, well before the advent of the general public Internet, while its sequel was released in 2010), is summarized and symbolized in the incipit of Tron: Legacynarrated by Jeff Bridges, who plays Kevin Flynn:
The Grid.
A digital frontier.
I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer.
What did they look like?
Ships? Motorcycles?
Were the circuits like freeways?
I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see
And then, one day
I got in
Directed then by Steven Lisberger, Tron invents without knowing it, and before its time, the imagery of cyberspacea futuristic concept of the Internet that William Gibson would define in his cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer as ” a graphical representation of data extracted from the memories of all computers in the human system “.
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