Now that we’re a few weeks into 2024 and the Hollywood strikes are in the rearview, the upcoming Tron: Ares has just started filming.
Director Joachim Rønning posted on Instagram the film wrapped its first week of production on Friday. The original start date was mid-August 2023, but the aforementioned strikes set things back, much to the filmmaker’s ire. At the time, he called them “extremely frustrating,” not helped by the fact that 150 crewmembers were indefinitely laid off until negotiations sorted things out. (Hollywood directors secured a deal with the AMPTP in mid-June as the WGA was in its second month of striking.)
Tron: Ares—or rather, Tr3n, as the logo calls it—has been in various forms of in the works for quite some time. Once Disney snatched up Marvel and Star Wars in the mid-2010s, it seemingly decided it had no need for the sci-fi series and decided to shelve it. Those plans changed last year when it finally decided to get a third entry off the ground, bringing on Rønning after he’d previously helmed Pirates of the Caribbean 5 and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.
Plotwise, details on the threequel are scarce. What’s mainly known is that Jared Leto will have the lead role (and serve as a producer), joined by the likes of Jodie Turner-Smith, Cameron Monaghan, Evan Peters, and Greta Lee. How it’ll follow on from Tron: Legacy, and if we’ll see any of that film’s cast like Jeff Bridges or Garrett Hedlund appear here, is currently up in the air.
Originally, Tron: Ares was expected to drop sometime in 2025. It never had a firm release date beyond that, and it’s currently unclear if it’ll get pushed to the following year because of the five-month delay in production.
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