The Big Picture

The director, Ángel Manuel Soto, emphasizes the importance of representation and creating a movie with heroes who look like him. Blue Beetle addresses societal issues through its antagonist, Victoria Kord, and the negative impact of Kord Industries on Palmera City. The film sets itself apart from previous DC projects by highlighting the significance of the Reyes family and their role in Jaime’s journey as the leading hero.

[Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Blue Beetle]Before DC’s Blue Beetle hit theaters, Collider offered fans an opportunity to check out the film in IMAX. Following the early screening, Editor-in-chief Steve Weintraub hosted a spoiler-filled Q&A with director Ángel Manuel Soto to get answers straight from the source for queries like, what’s with that mid-credits scene? Was that always going to be the ending? What scenes didn’t make it into the final film? And will we see more of Xolo Maridueña’s (Cobra Kai) Jaime Reyes/Blue Beetle in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DCU?

In our previous sit-down with Soto, the filmmaker discussed the importance of cultural representation for this first-ever Latino-led superhero feature. During their Q&A, a young fan dressed head-to-toe as Blue Beetle proved that assertion. “I did this movie because I never had a movie like this done for me,” Soto said, “with people that look like me being heroes of their own stories.” In addition to bringing on Maridueña as the leading hero, Blue Beetle spotlights societal issues through its antagonist, Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon), and the damage Kord Industries has done to the surrounding areas of Palmera City, and sets itself apart from previous DC projects by highlighting the significance of the Reyes family to Jaime’s heroic journey. The ensemble cast enlists the talent of George Lopez, Damián Alcázar, Adriana Barraza, and Belissa Escobedo as the Reyes family, as well as Bruna Marquezine as Jenny Kord, Harvey Guillén as Dr. Sanchez, and Raoul Max Trujillo as Conrad Carapax.

Check out the full interview in the video or transcript below to find out which deleted scenes Soto hopes fans will be able to catch on the Blu-ray, the DC staple the filmmaker wishes to explore the origins of, why Carapax’s flashback was so crucial, and all the DC Easter eggs and what they mean going forward. Soto also discusses Ted Kord and the Nintendo Power Glove, Booster Gold, exploring Jaime’s relationship with Khaji-Da (voiced by Becky G), and whether he has plans to move forward with a Blue Beetle sequel.

COLLIDER: Normally, without a strike, you have a cast to help promote something, so what the hell has it been like being the one who has to get out there and talk to everyone?

ÁNGEL MANUEL SOTO: It’s been intense. I don’t like to be in front of the cameras. I don’t mind having these conversations, I like it, but being in front of the camera for hours and hours and hours and then having to travel? It’s cool to go places, it’s not cool to travel. It gets very tiresome after a while, and the jet lag and the hour changes. Usually, for me, it’s more like emotional weight. Yes, you get physical exhaustion. It depends on who you interview with, it’s kinda exciting, and being in a different location, different place, different culture. It always feels cool, but that whole understanding that this moment for me, I would have loved it for them to experience it because we rarely get a chance to be leading movies, much less leading superhero movies. For me, them being taken away from that opportunity is the one thing that kinda weighs on me, but at the same time, I’m constantly reminded that one, it’s not about me, and two, they’re fighting a good fight. So I have to step up for them because they deserve it and what they’re doing right now—I’ve said it a bunch of times, and I’ll say it to the very end—sacrificing this opportunity that they have of being front and center to make sure that actors and writers have better pay and better treatment is a heroic act in itself. So, I will always support them, and I just hope people understand that and show up and support them too.

Image by Annamaria Ward 

“Stories the Way We Wanna Tell the Stories”
I can’t imagine what it’s like when you see a kid dressed up as Blue Beetle because it’s cool that we’re all enjoying the movie, but ultimately, what is it like for you as a filmmaker seeing kids where it means so much to them?

SOTO: Man, for me, as an adult and as a consumer of cinema, a cinephile, of course I love all types of movies. I consume it all: the good, the bad, the ugly. There’s a place for everything in the world, and I hope everything exists. [To kid in the audience dressed as Blue Beetle] But we did this movie for him, you know? I did this movie because I never had a movie like this done for me, with people that look like me being heroes of their own stories. So seeing that he’s pumped, he’s dressed up – did you like it?

BLUE BEETLE KID: Yeah!

SOTO: He liked it! [Laughs] My other movies are for adults, and I wanted to make a movie that my nephews and nieces can see, and I can entertain them, that in the Latino aspect of it that they can see themselves represented as heroes because I never got that chance. Not only to see myself as a hero or somebody from my community as a hero, because besides being vilified in Hollywood for such a long time, politically and culturally, our stories have never been told honestly, and they have never been told in mainstream Hollywood by people like us. So, having a film that has a writer, director, actors, a lot of the crew are Latino, we were able to come and protect and tell the stories the way we wanna tell the stories.

We make fun of our own stereotypes, but we make fun of it, not you. It’s up to us to make fun of ourselves, and we wanna have that type of fun and show the world that we can be fun; we can take all the nostalgia and make a throwback movie, and put ourselves in situations that are both fun and exciting and exhilarating, and enjoy life. And seeing that a kid like that is able to witness that, too, and like it, and tell his friends and dress up like Blue Beetle – when I made the movie, I didn’t know that could be a possibility. I know that that happens, but that’s never happened for a project that I’ve done, so seeing that is surreal.

Image via Warner Bros.

The Impact of IMAX
We’re screening here at IMAX headquarters in IMAX, and I really want to give a huge thank you to IMAX for partnering up. This is your first IMAX film, so was this the theater that you were checking it out in?

SOTO: Yeah, this is the theater that I QC’d it on. I was super excited to see it because we wanted it to be on IMAX. Even from the get-go, when they said, “Oh, we’ll do a theatrical…” it was like, “We want to be in IMAX.” This screen is ridiculous. This whole top-to-bottom thing, for me, is very impressive. We just recently got cinemas like this in Puerto Rico, and the first time that I witnessed an IMAX theater, I think I had to see the movie twice because I was just blown away by being able to experience it for the first time. It’s so immersive.

So, we really wanted it to be that way, and we really wanted to tap into it and not just go for the streaming. I know the film will end up in streaming, and that’s fine, but it was a disadvantage for us at first. We were like, “Man, finally we got a superhero that is Latino, and they’re sending us to streaming?” [Laughs] The fact that we were able to convince them otherwise and deliver a film for IMAX – it’s amazing. It’s like another thing that I wasn’t expecting, it wasn’t in my cards, and the fact that it could happen and that it is happening, and we got the support, it’s really impressive for me.

Image via WB

How Angel Manuel Soto Landed Blue Beetle for DC
I actually want to go back in time a little bit when you first went in to meet with Warner Brothers. Talk a little bit about walking in and pitching the studio and getting a project like this because it’s a big budget, it’s a big film, and it’s a big step forward for your career also.

SOTO: There’s something that I learned with DC, and that is that you don’t pitch DC, DC pitches you. That was really another thing that I was not expecting because I’ve been pitching. I did La Granja (The Farm, 2015) in Puerto Rico, and I did Charm City Kings afterwards here, but I did pitching for, like, 40/50 projects. Only one came through, which was Charm City Kings. After that, when we were gonna go to theaters after premiering at Sundance, the pandemic hit, so we were all in lockdown. I was in lockdown in Puerto Rico, and during that whole quarantine process, one of the executives of DC, Galen Vaisman, saw Charm City Kings, and he loved it. He loved the authenticity of the culture, of the environment. He loved the heart that it had and how much care I put into my characters, which is what I love to do. They enjoyed the chase sequence that the film has in the middle of the movie.

I get a call from DC, and I thought it was a general meeting, but it was actually completely something. I went in to pitch Bane because I wanted to make– I still want to make an origin story about Bane…I think it’s cool. And they were like, “Yeah, it’s cool, but that whole thing belongs to Matt Reeves.” I’m like, “Okay…” “But we’ve got something for you: Blue Beetle.” And that’s how it started. They pitched me Blue Beetle. At first, I was hesitant because I didn’t wanna brown-wash Spider-Man, I didn’t wanna fall into the tropes of the same rhetoric that Hollywood keeps perpetuating about Latinos, and they were like, “No, no, no, no, you have to read the script, it’s written by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer, he’s a Mexican…read it.” So when I read it, that’s when I got convinced because he had all the authenticity that only somebody from that community, from our community, would actually understand. I realized right there that the story of Blue Beetle and the representation was in good hands.

What do you think would surprise people to learn about making a big DC movie?

SOTO: I guess the bigger the project and the bigger the IP the less control you have. That is a fact. You would think it gets easier, but it doesn’t get easier. Literally, more money, more problems, and that’s very literal in the whole process of the filmmaking side. But the one thing that I did appreciate from having a project like this is that if you hire people around you that believe in the project, people that are not just after a paycheck, but they actually read the script, and they connected to the story, initially departments, you realize very quickly that they will have your back at the end of the day. It’s easier for you to learn how to delegate a lot of things, and then the more in the movie you have to take to yourself, being more in charge or hands-on. During that preproduction process, you’re able to communicate your vision and get it so tight-knit that at the end of the day, they’re able to protect you, to be in charge of the things they have to do so that I can focus on the things that I care about. I can focus on my sensibility of character first and be protective of my actors so that they can be in that emotional state, that physical, spiritual state, to get the performances that I wanna get. So, it does help to be able to have a solid team that has your back, and that comes with a bigger budget, for sure.

I’ve spoken to so many filmmakers that say if you make something for $10 million, you have a lot of control, and every $10 million above…

SOTO: You start losing and losing and losing control. Yeah. At the end of the day, it’s like working with a client. I did commercials for a long time, and I think what that prepared me for was the relationship that comes with working with a studio this big and with a project this big, that at the end of the day, you’re directing it, but it’s their movie.

Image via DC Studios

The Significance of Carapax’s Flashback
What is something that you really fought for that you got in the movie that you’re really happy worked out?

SOTO: The Carapax flashback, the villain’s flashback. For me, it was very important to humanize this villain because it is true that most times, the Latino representation in movies, we’re often introduced in the middle of the paragraph, right? We’re gangsters, we’re narcos, we’re this, we’re that, our communities are dangerous or whatever. We have never had the opportunity to explore what led to that. It’s always meant to feel like they’re born that way; that’s who they are, you know? And that’s not true. I’m not saying that that doesn’t exist, but that is not the reality that informs who we are.

So with a villain that is, from the top, ruthless, and his motivations are X and Y, I wanted Jaime, for Blue Beetle, not to follow through with his final blow and create that compassion. We wanted to create this moment of peeling off the layers and getting to the root of the trauma to understand that this person, his trauma, has been weaponized. And in order to create that, the flashback tells the story of this child soldier and how this region, which includes also the Caribbean region, has been consistently interfered with by imperial powers. That’s where the modern blood history is born, is by the consistent interference from American imperialization and trying to take over resources and staging coups and putting in public dictators to protect the interests of American companies — so Villa, in this case, the School of the Americas, which is a historical fact. I didn’t want this to fall into the fallacies or into a construct of fantasy. I wanted to show that even though this is a fantasy movie, there is a reality, a reality that exists, that is often overlooked or ignored [in] the history books because it is a dark part of what the US has done in Latin America, and I really wanted to explore it. That’s why even in the flashbacks, we intercut his story with archival footage of the School of the Americas, if anybody had doubts that it was fake, to create this sort of connection, given the fact that we haven’t been able to tell that story in mainstream cinema.

So that was very important for me to do because, one, there’s the plot aspect; it tells the story of how Victoria Kord has been involved in the weaponization of this trauma from the beginning. It also develops these therapy vibes of reaching into the core of trauma in order to create compassion for a villain and to understand why Jaime made that decision, and to actually feel like at the end of the day, yes, he still has to pay for his sins, but he can be absolved to the sacrifice. And the third layer of that thread is to create a historical context of one of the many things that affects Latin America and how that can play into the big part of the story.

Image via DC Comics

Blue Beetle’s DC Easter Eggs
Let’s talk about the fact that you got to put in, for people who maybe saw it, the establishing shot you got to put in LexCorp—I’m going to something lighter from what we were just talking about—but you get to include the Daily Planet, DC nods; what does that mean to you? Talk about some of the Easter eggs that maybe people should look out for the next time they watch, and were there any Easter eggs you wanted to do that Warner Brothers or DC were like, “No chance?”

SOTO: So, it is a very contained story. It is a new city for the DC Cinematic Universe, and we really wanted to make it feel like, yes, it is its own thing, but it still lives in the bigger construct of the DC Universe. And the same way that a lot of these mega-corporations have, we wanted to show the same thing, you know, LexCorp exists, all these companies exist in this globalized market. That’s some of the nods that exist in the movie. Jaime makes reference that, “I can fly, Superman can fly!” There is an awareness that these people exist; they just don’t care about Palmera City. [Laughs]

Not yet.

SOTO: Not yet. Because once they find out that a Mexican kid from a poor neighborhood has a weapon of mass destruction, I’m sure they’re gonna come after him. I’m sure the bug layer is tapped and surveilled by Batman. [Laughs] The other part that we were having fun with is when they’re waking Jaime up with a Vicks VapoRub [laughs], the newscast is in Spanish, but it’s talking about Bruce Wayne. You have to pay attention to it, but it sounded like, “The billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne just bought the dating app for $66 billion,” just making fun of Elon Musk a little bit.

There’s more. At the beginning of the title sequence, for those of you guys that follow the Blue Beetle comics, there’s a green light that hits this character, and that’s a Green Lantern. If you didn’t catch it, watch it again. Also, on the bug layer, and you see it also at the end, there’s a stack of Oreos, and who likes to eat Oreos?

AUDIENCE: Martian Manhunter.

SOTO: Exactly. So, maybe he was around.

With something like that, do you think that DC realized what you were doing or do you think it snuck through?

SOTO: No. [Laughs] “Yes, that was part of the design.” Nobody asked, right? Let’s go!

But there was stuff that we wanted to do. Part of the technology that was being developed from Kord Industries, when we were starting to design it, we wanted it to also be part of the way the technology develops for Destro, for example. We wanted to, in the display box in Kord Industries, some of the stuff that we wanted there, we wanted to have like a Kryptonite bullet, or a Flash helmet. We just wanted to give some nods like Kord Industries has had a part in the bigger lore of DC, and those were the ones that they were like, “Nope, nope.”

Image via DC

Blue Beetle Deleted Scenes
The movie is about two hours and seven minutes or so…

SOTO: With credits.

With credits. I know you told me previously that you needed to make a two-hour movie, but what was your director’s cut that you first submitted to the studio?

SOTO: No, it was 2:17.

Was that like 10 minutes of footage that you were super happy with, or is that fluff that you knew was gonna come out?

SOTO: It had fluff. It had some fluff. I knew that I still needed to trim some fat off that director’s cut, and I did. We did a version where I went in and I did that trimming, and it ended up being like 2:06/2:07. It wasn’t that much longer, but they really wanted it to be two hours, so a lot of some of the fighting sequences had to be trimmed down. Pacing-wise, rhythm-wise, it had to be rushed in some of the moments. In the beginning, there were a lot of conversations around the gentrification of the Edge Keys and how that’s affecting them more explicitly. So there were more conversations about what the family is facing directly through the displacement of the locals because Kord properties keeps buying people out.

There was one scene…there was, at the end, this big showdown between Carapax and Jaime where Jaime is losing it, and he’s getting drunker and drunker with rage, and Khaji-Da is trying to stop him. There’s a shot there that’s not there anymore. And one beautiful scene where the family is having a really nice moment outside of the house while Rudy is fixing the trampoline. While he’s fixing it, there’s a really endearing moment, and Jenny is witnessing this beautiful dynamic of the family which makes her kind of long for that. But that’s gonna be on the Blu-ray, maybe. I don’t know. [Laughs]

Hopefully the fans will be able to see that kind of stuff.

SOTO: I would love that. They’re very beautiful scenes and really exciting set pieces too. Maybe we’ll save some for the sequel.

Image via DC Studios

Inspiration for Building Palmera City Into DC
Talk a little bit about the visual style of the movie, how you maybe wanted certain colors to represent certain things or the music? Talk about those kind of things that the director puts their handprints on.

SOTO: As far as the look and feel, we really wanted to hone in on the nostalgia factor. We wanted to feel familiar in a way that feels cozy and nostalgic, and we wanted to recreate this neo-Tokyo essence of Palmera City. You have all these like highlight-y, glossy elements [of] more metropolitan areas that feel more futuristic. But at the same time, when you go into the barrios, we wanted to really lean into the soil vapor, the warmth, the community aspect of it. We wanted part of the house and the community to feel like a warm welcome, like a warm soup in the cold night, versus everything else that feels a little bit more stylized. Even when you go to the villains, like Victoria’s house or like the Kord building, there’s a sterile aspect to it, like hyper-clean, not at all trying to be anything more than just sterile, like her soul. [Laughs] You go inside Victoria’s house and then you go inside the Reyes house and you can feel there is a warmth in the Reyes house as a contrast to the villain.

As far as the music, we wanted the score to feel like that Tangerine Dreams energy that I miss so much and that I grew up with, and see how that kind of fits into the superhero genre and how those sounds give you those Miami-esque, ‘80s retro synthwave sounds just to shift it a little bit. We wanted it to feel cool, but the stuff that they listen to is very much from—I didn’t plan this coming into the project—that it would be like, “What would be each of the songs that each family member would have on their phones?” Let’s create that playlist, and let’s tell the story of, not just the legacy of music that they will listen to from old songs that are regional to Mexican heritage, but also, we make punk music in Latin America, we make ‘80s music in Latin America, and we consume American music, too, from Mötley Crüe…We consume everything. We’re not one particular thing. So we wanted it to feel like they exist in the real world, they don’t exist in a village far away. And even if they exist in a village far away, they consume this too. I listened to all the music [while] living on a small island in the Caribbean, so it’s kind of like, “How can we open ourselves to the world?” I think the best way is understanding that we also consume pop culture, and we like it, and we hear it, and we can have fun with it too.

Image via Warner Bros

Blue Beetle Filmed in Under 60 Days
Which shot or sequence in the movie was the back-breaker?

SOTO: Two. One was just conceptually, and the fact that we were dealing with somebody that wasn’t there who had COVID, and then we got him the next day, so we had to shoot around him. It was one of the first scenes we shot with everybody, not just the family. It’s like the whole family and Jenny Kord, which is when they come back and he shows his back and she’s kind of telling them the exposition of the scarab, and Rudy goes on his rent. That scene took a long time because it’s so chaotic because everybody in the family is talking all over each other, everybody has something to say, somebody is moving, spacing. It was intense to shoot because we were so limited in time. We shot this movie in 57 days.

For people that don’t realize, that’s not a lot of time.

SOTO: A romantic comedy takes longer. So, we had to shoot this movie in a short amount of time, so getting that scene working, that was probably the scene that took the longest to get it right. It was fun because we developed this thing where we shoot the script, and then we have one fancy, we call it the fancy one, where everybody can do whatever they want; they can have fun, they can joke, and whatnot. That’s where George Lopez thrives. So that rant– We only had one line in the script, and we just had the camera there, and he gave like a seven-minute improv rant of all the different things that Kord is doing to the community. [Laughs] It went crazy – like stuff that couldn’t be there, but it was fun. On the first friends and family screening, when the movie was like two hours and 40 minutes long, we played the whole thing just to hear the ones that people are laughing and connecting with. So, we left three in it.

Is there any chance you’re gonna release that whole thing online?

SOTO: We should. I should! [Laughs] It was funny. The one with the testicles, he made that up, and then the reaction is exactly the reaction…the actors are like, “Don’t laugh, don’t break. You can laugh but don’t really laugh,” you know? The reaction that Bruna [Marquezine] gives, that was real.

But the other one, that the one that really hurt my back [laughs], the back-breaker, was the Reyes house attack because, in a lot of these movies, the action sequences are done by a second unit. But that scene in particular, we did it, the first unit. For me, it was very important because it’s not just an action sequence, it’s not just a raid, it’s actually that feeling of dread and impotence that a family might feel when they’re being the victim, or when they’re being deported. That fear of losing everything that you have worked so hard [for], that you’re holding it by a thread, and all of a sudden some external forces are coming in, and they’re taking it away from you – the separation of the families, all that stuff. The dad doesn’t die because there was an accident or something fell on him, he dies because of all the stress of witnessing everything he has built getting lost and not being able to do anything about it.

It was intense because it took a couple of days to shoot, but it was also a very emotionally draining sequence, especially the sister, Milagro, the wailing and the crying. It was…This is the toned-down version. It was way more intense and visceral on the longer version, but it took you from everything else because you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to recover from this.” There was no joke that could recover from that version.

Image via Warner Bros.

Alberto Reyes Never Died In the Original Blue Beetle Script
I want to go further on that. Was he always the one who was going to die, or was there the possibility of another character in the film not making it?

SOTO: Originally, nobody was gonna die in the movie. But no, the studio kept pushing and convinced us, eventually, like, “How can we create the lowest of lows with the family member? And how that low is not just another death in the superhero genre, but how that low actually ends up being a power for him.” At the end of the day, what is that push that this reluctant hero needs at the end of the day for him to embrace his destiny? When we started to understand that, we were like, “This could be maybe a good opportunity to explore magic realism in this sequence where Jaime is about to die.” That’s the metaphor; his vision of the limbo or heaven or earth, or whatever you wanna call it, is his house, right? Heaven is this construct of the thing you feel is home, and this home starts to break apart. It’s like the ticking clock, you have to make a decision, time is running out. If you don’t make the decision, you’re gonna die. So while all that is happening…we wanted to hone into the magic realism that exists in Latin American literature and tell a version of this afterlife as how somebody can come in and embrace this leap of faith in a way that is reflective [of] the experience that we wanted to portray with our characters. So that’s when we said, like, “Man, I think that the dad has to go.”

Talk a little bit about the ending. Was it always the ending that we see on the screen, or was there ever another version of where the movie was gonna go?

SOTO: So this was always the ending, but there was a time where [we] wanted to explore an ending where everything is blowing up, and the Bug ship is going out, the Bug ship can’t make it, and Jaime gives the extra push and saves the family. But we felt like we’ve seen that before, and for me, I really wanted all the females in the story, all the women in Jaime’s life, to have a heroic arc. I wanted Jaime, on his journey, not to feel like, “This is me saving my family from death.” I really wanted the whole thing to feel like the family is saving Jaime so he can become the hero he’s supposed to become. And yes, Jenny has her moment with Victoria, but with Jaime, we wanted her to be the last hand and the push that pushes in, and the mom goes out. They didn’t need a superhero to save them, they save themselves, and they save the superhero, keeping the whole energy of, “We can save ourselves if we work together,” as opposed to, “We need somebody else to save us.”

Now, for the next movies, we can do whatever. But for this one, I really wanted it to be [that] everybody had a moment. Everybody was saving Jaime, protecting Jaime the same way that our mothers protect us for us to be the people that we are today. So, this is like a love letter to those matriarchs in our lives that help us become heroes in our lives.

Image via DC Comics

Blue Beetle Mid-Credits Scene Explained
You have a very fun mid-credit scene. Talk a little bit about how that ended up being the mid-credit scene. Was it ever going to be something else?

SOTO: No, the whole idea was we wanted a mid-credit scene that established the fact that Ted Kord is alive. We wanted not just to give closure to the energy that we have established in the movie about where is Ted Kord, what’s happened to Ted Kord, he’s missing his dad – we wanted to say that Ted Kord is out there. We want to set up a potential team-up where we can continue with the lore of Ted Kord or Booster Gold or one of those guys coming in to have a story. But the things that we were definitely debating were like, “Is he gonna show up physically? Is Booster Gold gonna show up physically?” So, given the regime changes that we’ve had in the making of this movie, and probably the unwillingness to commit to something because maybe it doesn’t fit into somebody’s universe, this was the compromise that we arrived at. He is out there, he was able to cut into the computer and deliver that message, and I think at the end of the day, it worked out. It’s pretty open to the fact that we could eventually have a Booster Gold thing happening.

Image via Annamaria Ward

Is There Going to Be a Blue Beetle 2?
The movie is about to come out, and you really don’t know what’s gonna happen. You hope for the best, but how much in your brain are you sort of like, “Man, I really am thinking about a sequel. I am thinking about where it could go?” And how much are you pushing those things out of your brain because you don’t want to jinx what could happen opening weekend?

SOTO: Well, before I knew that sequels were depending on performance—that’s the [naivity] in me—me and the writers always saw this movie as the first act of the saga. We always saw [that] Jaime’s story doesn’t end in his first movie. This first movie literally is the first act; the movie ends and now he can jump into the new world, right? The movie ends, and he’s still learning how to use this. He didn’t fully understand it. The banter between him and Khaji-Da was always evolving in the story, and we haven’t had that full interaction that we love from the comics happen yet. We wanted more of that to get developed and grow, and us, the audience, and even the fans, grow with him in the other iterations as he goes into two or three.

So we wanted to keep it self-contained. We didn’t want to immediately have him team up with anything. Those team-ups can happen whenever they want to happen, but in Jaime’s story, this is just literally the beginning. It just connected. Then comes the whole relationship aspect of it, which is like the next version that we wanted to explore. Now that this also is like a prologue of sorts that sets up the stage of who is Jaimie, who is his family, his personality, his community, now you don’t have to spend time exploring that. We wanna give this movie time to give this introduction properly so that we really know Jaime’s heart fully so that when the other movies come, we can start having explosions every five minutes if you want. But more importantly for me was just being able to get invested in the family first, make something intimate, make something more contained, and have the stakes be more personal than world-destroying stakes. That will come. Hopefully, he will fight the rich. Eventually, when the rich want to take over the world, they need Jaime to do it.

We wanna take him step-by-step. I’ve never been fond of, “I get the powers and 50 minutes in, I’m swinging like nothing happened, and I’m saving the universe with no experience.” I don’t know, I cannot relate to that. But I can relate to a kid who doesn’t want this type of attention because he’s already drawing too much attention for being Mexican in this country. So, he doesn’t wanna do that. Now he’s a superhero with world-destroying powers. That’s a dread, but now he’s understanding it, and now we’re ready to witness his transformation to become the superhero that we know he will be.

Image via A24

What Do Blue Beetle, Midsommar & Hereditary Have in Common?
I’m curious how you chose your cinematographer, Pawel Pogorzelski. How did you decide on your cinematographer because it’s an interesting choice?

SOTO: [Laughs] Well, I wanted to have a unique look. I didn’t want to look like everything else that we’ve done, and I’m a big fan of his work, from Hereditary to Midsommar to Nobody. I think he did amazing work in Nobody.

Also, Beau Is Afraid.

SOTO: I didn’t see Beau Is Afraid yet, but I saw Fresh, that he also did. He’s very versatile. All of those films are very different visually. When we met, just like the same thing with my VFX supervisor, for example, they were very persistent in wanting to do the movie, mainly because they connected to the story. Pawel is Polish, and the script is a Mexican family. He felt like this was his family, he felt like this was his story. He had lost his dad, and this meant so much to him, and he felt connected to the Reyes family, and that type of understanding at an emotional level from an artist is what I like to tap into. Same thing with Bobby Krlic, the composer, who also did Midsommar and Beau Is Afraid – I’m taking all of Ari Aster’s guys. They connected, and we talked about the story, and they would cry about how much it meant to them. That’s the type of creative relationship that I like to have when it’s not just like, “Yeah, I just wanna kick ass, and blah, blah, blah, blah.” That doesn’t do it for me. At the end of the day, even though this is a superhero movie, for me, it is way more important the emotional stakes and the emotional connection to have with the characters, that empathy that we can provoke with cinema. That’s the like-mindedness that I found with these collaborators. So Pawel was very open, and he loved the vision. He loved the idea behind it, and I think he delivered.

Image via DC Comics

Ted Kord and the Nintendo Power Glove
I could dig in on so many of the shots, but I know I’m gonna run out of time. I’m going to get into probably the most important thing; we’ve talked about it a little bit, but the audience probably has not heard it, and that is the Nintendo Power Glove. So for people that don’t realize, who are young, who do not know what the Nintendo Power glove is…

SOTO: You’re missing out!

Back in the early days, it was a device that came out with the Nintendo NES a long time ago. If you were a kid, it was very expensive. I only knew one person that had it. It had the controller and the buttons on it, and it was really cool. They also had the Fred Savage movie, [The Wizard]. Anyway, it’s a really cool thing from a long time ago, and you did an homage to it in this movie.

SOTO: So Ted Kord is from the ‘80s, right? He’s an ‘80s guy, and we always wanted the memory of him to have gotten stuck in that era. And as a guy who tinkers with stuff, and because he couldn’t hone the powers of the Scarab, he created technology to replicate it. Given the way that Ted Kord is, we were like, “Well, what if you start tinkering with this stuff that’s from the ‘80s like the GPS is a Gameboy?” Like, why not? Back then, you didn’t have the technology like that, but what if you used everyday objects or toys or Nintendo Power Gloves to create something cool? And that’s because I had a cousin that had the Nintendo Glove, and he would never let me use it. I always liked the idea that—and I wonder why—but I always saw the stuff that he did, and I was like, “Man, what if I could use it for the first time and slap him?” And I wanted to incorporate it into the story. I was like, “Well, he tinkered it and he was able to create the Hologram out of it,” because that’s what my imagination was thinking at the time — this movie is like me being 12 again and playing with real people as toys. I was like, “Yeah, let’s have that moment and create that inspiration,” because it’s a very cool device. Let’s bring it back and use it in this world and establish it as canon in the universe because it’s such a cool device, and the way it deploys, and the way she uses it, she just slapped the guy. So that, for us, was really fun to use, and again, just pay an homage to our imaginations when we were kids.

I saw the prop at the junket. How did you not keep that for yourself?

SOTO: [Whispers] I told you I don’t have one…No, no, we had a couple. I think we broke one, and that was the one left. So, it’s been difficult to…

Borrow it?

SOTO: Yeah, it’s been very difficult. “What happened to it? It disappeared.” But I do have one of those Gameboys, which is cool because it has the camera…it is a camera that you can actually record eighth beat video with it. It’s really cool.

What are the things you borrowed from set? Do you have one of the costumes?

SOTO: We tried! We tried to lose that costume, and that’s a very hard and expensive thing to lose. [Laughs] I’m still wondering if I can get a helmet. I would love to get a helmet.

I think that if the movie does well, you should email James [Gunn] and Peter [Safran] and be like, “Helmet?”

SOTO: Just a helmet. The one that got damaged because we used it. All the stunts are real and all the Blue Beetle suits that you see in the stunts are real Blue Beetle suits that we smash against the ground, and everything was like a whole cable system.

That’s one of the reasons it looks good on frame, it’s not the CGI suits. So, how many of those suits did you actually build, and do you actually know how much each one costs? Like a roundabout?

SOTO: We did five, some $30 to $50k each, but the first one was like a million or something.

Wait, what?

SOTO: [Converses with someone from production.] Nah. Well, the first one was expensive, okay?

Image via Paramount Pictures

From DCU to the Transformers Spin-Off Movie
I read something—and I could be very wrong about what I’m about to ask you—I read that you’re actually working on a Transformer spin-off movie, but this could be wrong. Is it right or wrong?

SOTO: No, that’s right.

Alright, so let’s talk about this. What can you say?

SOTO: Well, I can say for a fact that Blue Beetle comes out August 18.

That is the most important thing, obviously.

SOTO: No, but the other thing is early screenings of Blue Beetle start tomorrow.

Did you pitch them an idea, and they said, “Oh, that’s really good,” or was it one of these things similar to Blue Beetle?

SOTO: No, I pitched them an idea. I read a script, I didn’t like it, and I pitched them a whole different idea, and they liked it, but then it was too late. So they told me, “Yeah, we cannot do your idea, but we like your idea, so we want you to write the idea and then direct it.” So, we’ve been in that process, but the writers’ strike happened.

Totally. I’m so curious. So curious.

SOTO: [Laughs] It will be different, it will be different.

The thing about that franchise is when they made that first one, they never thought they were gonna make 22 of them. So you’ve got to have it fit in in the thing, except next summer they have that ILM-animated Transformers One. Everyone that I’ve spoken to involved says it’s amazing.

SOTO: I’ve heard the same thing. I mean, I’m a huge Transformers fan.

Blue Beetle is in theaters now. Go see it in IMAX, and make sure we get that sequel!