Blue Beetle sent a drone up buildings at 75 mph for its flight scenes

How can you make a new superhero film out of a classic as old and as beloved as comic books themselves? That’s the challenge Blue Beetle’s stunt 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. The stunt team behind the film was a different story. Blue Beetle The goal was to change the game. 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’s action 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. Perry spoke with Polygon on Zoom and was effusive about his admiration 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 You can also find out more about the following: 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 RiderHe also said that there are many other elements to Blue Beetle Reminded him of Japanese productions called Tokusatsu

The Blue Beetle fires from his energy cannon, as lightning sparks

The challenge for the team was keeping Blue Beetle’s flight grounded in reality, which is exactly as difficult as “grounded superhero flight” sounds. Specifically, Perry and his team were looking to prevent “float,” when it becomes easier to tell the movement isn’t natural. Imagine that a pendulum is swinging up and down. This is because if a pendulum leaves its path suddenly, it will look artificial. This same principle also applies to performers on wires who are trying to simulate flight.

When Jaime flies, how can you solve this problem? Blue Beetle The team would add impact points right before a moment when he could pass the imaginary pendulum. This is most clearly seen in Jaime’s first flight. The alien device takes Jaime on a trial run where he crashes into various environmental hazards. Blue Beetle is able to zoom around the wirework as it changes direction with each impact.

“When it turns into a cartoon, you can tell when gravity doesn’t play into it,” Perry says. “There’s reality, then there’s reality plus 10%. You’ve crossed the 10% mark. [the audience thinks], There’s something not right. The feeling is immediate.

“A lot of times with wirework, it’s either action or reactionary wirework,” Perry says. “We combined it — it was action with that reaction. It’s not easy to do. It takes a lot of skill and a lot of rehearsal.”

The Blue Beetle runs away from an explosion as a camera operator pulls the camera with a pully on the set of Blue Beetle.

The wirework is only part of the equation. Perry also worked again with Tommy Tibajia a Wild Rabbit Aerial drone pilot who was a frequent collaborator. Day Shift, Murder Mystery 2.The upcoming action film starring Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz Return to Action.

“He put on a frickin’ seminar,” Perry says of Tibajia. “That’s a really hard one to get right, flying. It’s a really tricky one. With the FPV [first-person view] drone, I think that we’ve taken it to another level.”

The drones flew at 75mph, diving and ducking under traffic lights, bridges and buildings. The drones’ footage was then married with shots of Maridueña or a stunt performer on the wire to create a realistic effect of high-speed flight. It is much more realistic than static images you would get with pure CG, and it’s cheaper than helicopters.

“Speed is speed,” Perry says. “When something goes 75 miles an hour, blowing by things, you feel it.”

Xolo Maridueña looks surprised while wearing the Blue Beetle suit in front of a stone wall in Blue Beetle.

Maridueña did quite a bit of the wirework in Blue Beetle The Netflix show, “Fight Club,” and the experience of its star Cobra Kai came in handy.

“He’s about to be a massive star,” Perry says of Maridueña. “Not only is he an amazing actor, and one of the hardest-working, most humble, kind people I’ve met, but he’s great at action as well. He’s a real one. I was really lucky to work with guys like that.”

Perry’s team and he wanted the audience to be able to really experience and feel the speed, impact and power of Blue Beetle’s flights. And the stunt team — who, Perry reiterates, was “all time, like the greatest hits” — delivered. The flying isn’t the only action in the movie that has an impact: The movie’s fights lean on the skills and bodies of its stunt performers, who frequently get flung through the air and used as physical weapons, especially in the third-act tunnel fights. The visceral feeling of bodies violently contacting bodies is crucial to any action director’s work, especially when working with larger-than-life set-pieces augmented by visual effects.

“You can’t cheat impact, right? They haven’t figured that one out yet,” Perry says. “And thank God, because when they do, I’ll be out of a damn job.”

Blue BeetleThe movie is now in cinemas.

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