The Big Picture

Blue Beetle is the first Latin superhero to lead a feature film in the DC Universe, and the movie emphasizes the importance of the Reyes family’s dynamic in the hero’s story. Director Angel Manuel Soto prioritized hiring Mexican actors for the cast to ensure authenticity and representation and sought to create a film that resonates with all audiences. The film balances practical effects and CGI to enhance the visual experience, and Soto’s team worked hard to create a world-building that feels worthy of watching on the big screen, including immersive IMAX screens.

The first superhero feature debut in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Universe belongs to director Angel Manuel Soto’s Blue Beetle. Following an early screening, Collider’s Steve Weintraub had the opportunity to sit down with the filmmaker to discuss finally bringing this DC hero to the big screen after talks of going straight to streaming prior to production. Starring Xolo Maridueña (Cobra Kai) as Jaime Reyes/Blue Beetle, Blue Beetle marks the first time a Latin superhero takes the lead in a feature, and Soto’s film is going to put Palmera City on the DCU map!

When Jaime Reyes returns home a college grad, his future feels full of potential, but his homecoming isn’t quite what Jaime expected. While seeking out job opportunities, a peculiar biotechnology is bestowed upon him, and the alien scarab known as Kahji-Da (voiced by Becky G) chooses Jaime as its symbiotic host, granting him the powers of the Blue Beetle. Like the superheroes before him, Jaime Reyes’ connection to his family is a crucial aspect of his character, but unlike most superheroes, Soto tells us, the Reyes family’s dynamic is an important part of the Blue Beetle’s story, beginning with his very first transformation. Because the family is so integral to his arc, that meant enlisting a talented, ensemble cast, and to do so, Soto says it was important to “…hire Mexican actors – not just Mexican Americans, but also go to Mexico and get the best stars from Mexico.” That’s why Blue Beetle’s stacked cast features George Lopez (Rudy Reyes), Harvey Guillén (Dr. Sanchez), Belissa Escobedo (Milagro Reyes), Bruna Marquezine (Jenny Kord), Damián Alcázar (Alberto Reyes), and Adriana Barraza (Nana). As for Blue Beetle’s first feature nemeses, Raoul Max Trujillo plays Conrad Carapax, and Susan Sarandon is Victoria Kord.

During their one-on-one conversation, Soto talks about what it feels like to finally share this project with the world and why it’s especially important to be able to release in theaters on immersive IMAX screens. They talk about the Nintendo Power Glove’s influence over the film, how he hopes the film resonates with all audiences, and why a superhero movie with a Latino “front and center” is such a necessary story to tell, adding that too often, “…our stories are told in the middle of the sentence.” They also talk DC Easter eggs, the “obscene” and authentic humor, doing as much practically as possible, and more. Check it all out in the video or transcript below.

COLLIDER: What is this like for you? Because you put your heart and soul into this for years, and it really is only in the last few days that you find out if people like what you’ve done. I was at the screening last night with a packed audience laughing at so many things, me laughing at so many things, people clapping, so what is this all like for you?

ANGEL MANUEL SOTO: It’s surreal. It’s one of those things that you hope is their reaction – knowing that something we did with a lot of passion and a lot of pride resonates with people from all walks of life, and the stuff that doesn’t actually draws curiosity to learn more about it. Being able to have people feel like, “Finally, I can see myself be a hero of something,” is something truly special.

Do you think—true or false—that the main reason people enjoy the movie is that you had fun with the Nintendo Power Glove, and that aspect of the Nintendo Power Glove powers everything?

SOTO: [Laughs] True. No, but the nostalgia of all those things that we grew up being and using because I never had a Nintendo Glove like that.

Oh, I didn’t either.

SOTO: But I had friends that did, and every time I wore it, I felt powerful because you’re like, “Oh man. What if I can create anything?” We’re here in the movie, and when we’re building this, I’m like, “Why not?” Because it was written that there was something like a shield, and I’m like, “How does that shield exist? Where does it deploy?” I’m like, “The Nintendo arm brace, the Glove, man. I have to do it.”

Image via Steve Weintraub

One of the things about this film is it was going to be going straight to HBO Max, and then they decided to change it to be a theatrical release. I am curious, when you got involved, had that decision been already made, or were you involved?

SOTO: No, when I came onto the project, the mandate was at the time that everything goes to HBO Max, right? And I was like, “Sure, I’ll do the movie. Of course, [it’s] a great opportunity.” But I’m like, it can’t be that the first time that we have a Latino superhero front and center—not just a Latino playing a hero, but where he is a Latino, his family is Latino, and they’re gonna actually be heroes of their own stories for the first time—I was like, “It cannot just live on streaming. He has to go to the theaters.” The whole experience of watching these fantastical movies is to be amazed and in awe, and what about being able to see our culture represented differently?

So we worked very, very hard to do this world-building where the action sequences, the suit, the passion of the family, and the cultural aspects are presented in a way worthy of watching it, not only in the theater but even on IMAX, and being able to see our communities that way. I think that we did an amazing job in bringing it to life on the concept development of it all that at the end, Warner Bros. decided that this movie has to go to the theaters.

With this movie, no matter how much money you get, you’re always against the wall with the budget, right? So, my thing is, how the F would you pull this movie off making it for 10 or 20 or 25 million, you know what I mean? It would be impossible.

SOTO: Yeah, I don’t honestly know the logic and the politics behind it. What I do know is that we were able to be smart about how we handled our budget. That’s why we went practical, and that’s why we went to real locations. And oddly enough, that also makes it feel bigger and more immersed because even the third act takes place in a real fortress that’s 500 years old in Puerto Rico. That’s not like a green screen set, you know? So, being able to do that and see the magnificence of this building, how imposing it is, and being able to capture that and have fun with this adventure in it, it was a way for us to be able to stretch our budget in a way that kind of delivers on it, I guess.

Image via Warner Bros.

Also, I think the audience, including myself, and I’m sure you, when you’re seeing whole shots that are CGI, it’s like a cartoon. When you have those practical locations, and you’re adding CGI elements, it feels so much better.

SOTO: You enhance it. One of the things that we agreed upon is if we become so heavily dependent on the VFX, it will balloon with inflation and the expectations. You have to have so much stuff done prior to it. By doing it in real locations or using a practical suit, our VFX supervisor Kelvin [McIlwain], he was like, “It’s better to enhance it,” because I already have the lighting reference. Everything is there, it’s just enhancing it, or it’s just doing set extensions. And by doing it that way, it just felt like that’s a real suit, it’s not a gray suit.

Also, Mayes Rubeo creating this suit with all his intricacies, but at the same time, creating a suit whose materials were done in a way that it could be flexible so that we can also do the stunts in real life. It wasn’t a video game or mocap; it’s literally stunts, a lot of cable work, all that stuff so that it feels like it has weight so that it feels like it’s more tangible.

That’s one of the reasons I bought into the movie. So your movie is a little over two hours. I ask this of every director, how did it change in the editing room? Did you have a longer cut?

SOTO: Yeah.

How did you end up with that running time?

SOTO: Because they asked me to do a movie less than two hours. [Laughs]

Exactly, yeah.

SOTO: 100%. Less than two hours. And with credits, it bleeds into 2:07. My version wasn’t that much longer. It was, like, two hours and seven minutes.

Oh, so just a little bit.

SOTO: It was just a little bit, but it’s stuff that hurts. But you have to compromise.

I understand. See, what’s interesting is that as I’ve gotten older, I actually understand both sides of it. But also, with Blu-rays you can release things.

SOTO: I hope so. I hope we can because there’s a lot of really nice stuff that stayed out.

What was the last thing that you cut before you picture-locked? It was that close to being in the movie?

SOTO: There was a really pretty scene that showed their family dynamic in front of Jenny [Bruna Marquezine]. Jenny arrives, and there’s the chaos, and then they go out and save– you know. But in between those moments, there was a beautiful dynamic of the family and just Jenny witnessing and absorbing it all. You can see in her amazing performance how much she longed for that experience, and it was a really pretty scene. If the family already had that chemistry there, it was more festive chemistry. It was very nice. I miss that scene.

Image via WB

Again, hopefully Blu-ray, you know?

SOTO: [Laughs] Yeah.

I don’t want to do any spoilers, but there is a wide shot of the city, and maybe I saw a LexCorp in the background. So I wanted to know, when you put a LexCorp sign in, is that something that you have to run up the flag pole to everybody? How does that approval process work, and were there things you wanted to put in the background there that they’re like, “No?”

SOTO: Yeah, there are definitely things that we wanted to put in that they were like, “No,” because it might attach it to a different universe or something. Of course, we went hard with all the Easter eggs that we could; we wanted to have as much as we could. When building the city, this cosmopolitan city that has all these neon lights and that has all these holographic elements to it, we wanted to make it feel like it also belongs to the greater DC Universe, and Lexcorp is Lexcorp. The same thing with Gotham law school, Gotham is Gotham. That will never disappear within the lore of the superheroes, so why not have our hero also exist in a world that is affected by all these other legacies?

I even think I saw The Daily Planet.

SOTO: The Daily Planet is there.

There are a few things in there.

SOTO: There’s also a box of Oreos in the bug layer. I don’t know if you noticed that.

Yes, there’s also— We’ll continue this once the movie is out to get into some more stuff.

SOTO: [Laughs] Just a couple of things!

Image via WB

This is your first time having this kind of budget to play with VFX and this kind of scale and scope. What did you learn that you maybe wish you knew on the first day? Because this is obviously a growing period for you as a filmmaker having these kinds of resources that you’ve never had before.

SOTO: I was very lucky to have my heads of department have experience. I trust them. I think they’re masters of what they do, and having them navigate me, having them help me navigate those waters from preproduction allowed [for] that for me to not be so much of a clash of understanding. I was able to really focus on the things that I care [about] the most, which is character and emotionality, and you don’t need the effects for that. So I was able to trust them on this in the same way that they trusted me, and they made it very easy for me to navigate that.

But if there’s something else now that I know more that I could do later, [it] is understanding where you want your energy to be focused on right off the bat in order for things to work out easier. Because there’s always gonna be challenges, right? The whole job is about dealing with obstacles, but I think a lot of those obstacles can be addressed beforehand on preproduction and avoided so that it can be smoother sailing. It’s always gonna be bumpy, but you can get better tires if you know the road is gonna be bumpy.

There are some jokes in the movie—I’m not gonna spoil anything—that I was very surprised you were able to put in this movie. So I really want to know, how did you pull off some of the jokes that the audience is gonna see that are surprising jokes in a superhero movie, this kind of film?

SOTO: [Laughs] Well, some of those jokes were actually taken out of the comic itself. It might be just one frame of the comic, but there are jokes that we took from it. There’s also jokes that, I guess, the cultural differences might benefit the existence of it, [laughs] if that makes sense.

No, it does. It’s one of these things where I can’t be specific because everyone watching this will not have seen the movie, but I am just gonna say that you’re gonna laugh a lot.

SOTO: Yes, you’re gonna laugh a lot, you’re gonna laugh a lot. And a lot of it came on the day. We made it a habit that, you know, we shoot the script, and once I feel that I get it, I always give them one last run, and we call it a fun scene. So, “Okay, fun scene!” And everybody knows this is the time that we can be obscene, that we can be funny, that we can be whatever. And a lot of those moments came from the fun scene takes. So I think because if it’s not forced, nobody is trying to pull a joke, it comes authentic to the characters and the situation that makes it relatable because they’re free. The characters are free to do it themselves within the boundaries of their characters. So it just helps to have, also, talented people. It just helps.

Image via Warner Bros.

What did you actually want to include from your own experiences and the environments that you grew up in that were really important to you to put in this movie because this movie means an awful lot to a lot of people?

SOTO: I wanted this film, because it is the first time you see a character that is Latino on the paper, that his families are Latino, I really wanted to ground it on the experiences that form a lot of us, right? Like oftentimes in a lot of movies, our stories are told in the middle of the sentence, or in the middle of the paragraph, like, boom, gangster, boom, you came out of prison, boom. We never have a chance to tell our history of where we come from and the stuff that really does affect us. So how can we introduce this character? Because this is what this movie is. It’s like the first act of a potential saga that we wanna create for the Blue Beetle journey.

One of the things that we wanted to do, first of all, was hire Mexican actors – not just Mexican Americans, but also go to Mexico and get the best stars from Mexico for this movie, like Damián Alcázar or Adriana Barraza. They bring their own authentic experiences to the movie, and that helps a lot to inform the conditions we want to put the Reyes family in. We want the Reyes family to live in a world that affects their environment, that affects their decisions. Like for example, in my case, from Puerto Rico – displacement, colonialism, gentrification. Those are things that are real threats, home insecurity, not putting food on the table, proper health care. All those things that are our villains, but at the same time, what are all those things that are our heroic things, like community, like standing up against a tyrant or standing up against the things that weaken us, but doing it through the power of family and community?

So by being able to hone into those experiences that I know firsthand, that the writer also knows firsthand because Gareth [Dunnet-Alcocer] is from Mexico, we were able to find where our different journeys intersect in a similarity of experiences that not only affect our individual countries but also affects countries in Latin America and abroad.

Blue Beetle is in theaters August 18.