‘Because they asked me to do a movie less than 2 hours’: Warner Bros. up to its old tricks again with ‘Blue Beetle’ running time and exiled Easter Eggs

For whatever reason, Warner Bros. seems obsessed with having its superhero movies run for two hours or less, with the mandate having been implemented several times dating all the way back to Joss Whedon’s dreaded Justice League, with Blue Beetle the latest to be designated as close to 120 minutes as possible.

Director Angel Manuel Soto isn’t even shy in admitting it, either, with the filmmaker responding to a question from Collider how he managed to settle on a running time that flies past at a breezy pace.

“Because they asked me to do a movie less than two hours. 100 percent. 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.”

Not only that, but having previously confirmed that Blue Beetle makes reference to several iconic DC figures and locations without placing itself in a definitive corner of the mythology, Soto revealed that the studio asked him to excise a couple of Easter Eggs that may have been too on-the-nose.

“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? The Daily Planet is there. There’s also a box of Oreos in the bug layer. I don’t know if you noticed that. Just a couple of things!”

It sounds like Blue Beetle is very much part of a shared DC universe, then, but given that we know the title hero will return under James Gunn’s watch, its director was careful to ensure that it never gets named explicitly.