With Blue Beetle now playing in theaters, there's only one movie left - Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom - before we bid farewell to the DCEU once and for all.
A couple of months ago, we learned about the struggles the Aquaman has faced in terms of multiple rounds of reshoots. Those have all been done in an effort to try and make the movie work, though it's beginning to sound like something of a lost cause (a shame considering its predecessor made over $1 billion in 2018).
While we're hoping the DCEU goes out on a high, that same report mentioned Blue Beetle also underwent a couple of days of additional photography this year. Now we've all seen the movie, we know it's largely standalone without any direct ties to the DCU or DCEU, so what were those reshoots for?
"To be honest, we didn’t add anything that wasn’t in the script already," Angel Manuel Soto tells The Hollywood Reporter. "We shot things that were in the script, but we just didn’t have time to do them [during principal photography]. In order for me to finish the movie, we needed those extra days."
"So they weren’t necessarily reshoots, but we did reshoot one scene to make it tighter. Everything else was a lot of the backstory that was very important to the story and Raoul Max Trujillo’s character," the filmmaker adds. "It was very important for me to tell the backstory of our villain, and that was pretty much the reason why we continued shooting. So I don’t call it reshoots; it was just finishing what was promised to me."
It all sounds pretty minor and debunks theories that the Ted Kord-centric mid-credits scene was added as a means of tying Blue Beetle to DC Studios' upcoming Booster Gold TV series.
However, it does sound like James Gunn and Peter Safran gave Soto the green light to keep that sequence in the DCEU movie.
"When James Gunn and Peter Safran came into power, they already promised the whole idea of exploring Booster Gold, and it helped us to keep the idea that Ted Kord is still alive. Now, where is he? Well, what happens next is up to the success of the film. The movie has to perform in the eyes of the studio."
"So, in my mind, if the movie can perform," he teases, "there’s more adventures to come for Jaime Reyes, and Ted Kord is a part of that setup."
Blue Beetle is now playing in theaters.