‘We didn’t want to exploit the VFX artists’: ‘Blue Beetle’ director reveals how the film’s minimal use of CGI came to be

We’re still a day out from its release in theaters, but, as further proved by the tenacious Battalion, Blue Beetle has long since established itself as a champion of superhero movies in a number of ways; beyond the film’s soaring early reviews, Jaime Reyes’ origin story dares to indulge in cape shenanigans that don’t involve the total annihilation of the universe and everyone in it, and it sounds like director Ángel Manuel Soto all but full-sent the premise of a tight-knit Latino family in the best possible way.

And, it sounds like Blue Beetle also chose to go against the grain by defying one of the genre’s biggest grievances in recent years; an over-reliance on CGI effects. Indeed, from The Flash to just about everything that Marvel Studios has put out in the past eight months, it seems like the only thing saturating the genre landscape more than CGI is the complaints about it.

And, beyond loving Zack Snyder, Young Justice, Injustice 2, and apparently making great movies, Soto has now also marked himself as a proponent of practical effects and, get this; not exploiting VFX workers. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Soto gave an absolutely pristine take on CGI, noting that he understood it to be frosting rather than the cake, so to speak, and how that attitude subsequently gave his movie an excess of natural space to breathe in.

“It’s a tool, not a dependency, and that really helped to make this whole thing feel bigger than life. We shot the third act in a real 500-year-old fortress in Puerto Rico. The communities depicted weren’t a set. We went to the barrios of Puerto Rico and shot there. A lot of the people in the background are people from that community.”

From squaring up against execs, to taking inspiration from Young Justice, and now demonstrating a belief in CGI that studios would all do well to follow, Soto seems like a never-ending fountain of green flags, and we can only hope his presence in this genre space continues to grow.

Blue Beetle lands in theaters on Aug. 18.