In the days of bloated budgets, long shoots followed by re-shoots then more re-shoots, and 18-month turnaround times where workers lose the will to live,DC’s delightfully charmingBlue Beetlehas bucked the trend by not just delivering a fun film but actually coming in at areasonable—comparatively speaking, of course—budgetand, as the film’s directorÁngel Manuel Sotohas revealed, in absolutely rapid fashion too.
DC films in particular have been plagued by re-shoots, withAquaman and the Lost Kingdom,The Flash,andShazam! Fury of the Godsall coming in for trouble, blowing up the budgets for the films and extending shooting by weeks and months at a time. It was reported last month thatBlue Beetlehad two days of re-shoots, which had no real effect on the time the movie took to shoot. It should be noted that the filmmakers did request more time to re-shoot but were denied this by Warner Bros. Nonetheless,the film was delivered in record time and well receivedwith Soto telling Collider’sSteve Weintraubat our special IMAX screening that the entire production took place over less time than that of the average romantic comedy, while discussing what scene was the most difficult logistically to shoot for the film, thanks to that old nemesis of humanity, COVID.
Ángel Manuel Soto on The Most Complicated ‘Blue Beetle’ Scene to Film
“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,” said Soto. “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.”
Soto then continued, elaborating:
“It was intense to shoot because we were so limited in time. We shot this movie in 57 days. 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.”
You can catchBlue Beetlein theaters now, and while you’re here, check out our full interview with the film’s director Ángel Manuel Soto down below.
