Movies

Tron 3 Starts Shooting, First Set Photo Released

Production has started on Tron 3 and director Joachim Rønning has a first photo!
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After much delay and plenty of talk, Tron 3 has officially started filming and we’ve got the first Tron 3 set photo. Filmmaker Joachim Rønning, who previously dabbled in a big time Disney sequel with  2017’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, is behind the camera as director and shared the first look at the Tron 3 set. The first Tron 3 set photo reveals a production chair with the film’s logo, which doesn’t refer to the movie as Tron: Ares (the previously revealed title), but instead called it just Tron 3 (stylized as TR3N). Since filming began on the movie, the cast for Tron 3 has grown, with The X-Files star Gillian Anderson now attached to appear in the movie in an undisclosed role.

“WEEK 1 ON THE GRID,” reads the caption from director Joachim Rønning on Instagram, who added three emojis of a disc flying through the air afterward. The filmmaker also tagged Disney and star Jared Leto in the image, confirming his casting. Not much can be gleaned from the Tron 3 set photo, which appears to serve more as a confirmation of the start of filming than anything, but there is one curious detail. Both previous Tron movies were primarily lit in blue, but the image for Tron 3 shows intense red lights bathing the set; a change that will certainly have fans wodnering.

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Very little is actually known about the upcoming Tron 3 beyond the fact that Jared Leto (Suicide Squad, Dallas Buyers Club) will star in the film. The cast for Tron 3 also includes some other famous faces including Evan Peters (X-Men: Days of Future Past, American Horror Story), Greta Lee (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse), Jodie Turner-Smith (The Last Ship), Sarah Desjardins (Yellowjackets), and Cameron Monaghan (Gotham). It’s unclear if any of the original stars from the first movie or even 2010’s Tron: Legacy will be involved.

Speaking in a previous interview with ComicBook.com, original stars Bruce Boxleitner (Tron himself!) and Cindy Morgan (Dr. Lora Baines/Yori) both seemed open to the idea but noted at the time (about 10 months ago) that they hadn’t heard anything. “I wish them luck. I think it’s high time they did do it,” Boxleitner said. “It’s been a long time since Legacy already. And I think it’s a re-imagining of it, a reboot. It needs that, and it needs it for a younger … This generation…We did it for ours, but they need it. So, I’ll always be associated with it. I was the first Tron.”

Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski previously revealed that he had plans for making a third movie, but noted that Disney’s investment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars resulted in Tron being put on the back burner. It worked out for him though as he ended up making one of the highest grossing movies of the 2020s, the Oscar-winning Top Gun: Maverick. He still has thoughts about Tron though.

“Whenever a TRON comes out, it needs to push the envelope in some way, or in every way,” the filmmaker shared with ComicBook.com. “That’s a fundamental requirement of a TRON movie, is it needs to be ambitious on a filmmaking level and hopefully on a narrative level, and the ideas behind it. [Director] Steven Lisberger’s ideas for the first movie were so ahead of their time. I think it’s imperative that that be a part of any TRON movie. I don’t ever see TRON being something where you pump one out every two years. You just can’t. They’re too hard to make. It’s got to be a passion project and it’s got to really be reaching for something different and innovative and ambitious, because that’s in the DNA of it.”