Blue Beetle sent a drone up buildings at 75 mph for its high-speed flight sequences
How does a superhero movie breathe new life into a staple as old as comics themselves? That’s the challenge Blue Beetle’sstunt and effects teams faced when trying to capture the feeling of their protagonist’s high-speed flight.
From the earliest days of Superman movies to Iron Man and Captain Marvel, flight has been a crucial part of superhero cinema’s visual vocabulary. But the stunt team on Blue Beetle was determined to shake things up. The goal: to imbue the new DC movie’s flight sequences with speed, impact, and a little bit of flair, combining innovative wirework with high-speed drone footage to freshen up a superhero staple.
Blue Beetle follows Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña), a teenage boy who bonds with an alien device that gives him a variety of powers, including flight. The movie’saction was shot by second-unit director J.J. Perry, a legendary stunt performer and choreographer who made his feature directorial debut with last year’s Jamie Foxx vampire action throwback Day Shift. Talking to Polygon via Zoom, Perry was effusive in his praise for Blue Beetle’s stunt team, which included many members of the 87eleven action team, best known for their work on the John Wick movies.
He particularly highlighted the wirework for the movie’s flight scenes, which he said are “some of the best in the last 10 or 15 years,” crediting stunt coordinator Jon Valera and his team. That’s a high bar to reach — Perry worked extensively in the ’90s with Alpha Stunts, the incredible group who worked on Power Rangers and Kamen Rider, and he said many elements of Blue Beetle reminded him of Japanese tokusatsu productions.
The challenge for the team was keeping Blue Beetle’s flight grounded in reality, which is exactly as difficult as
Read more on polygon.com
