Angel Manuel Soto

Angel Manuel Soto (birthname: Angel Manuel Soto) has made one of the most successful leaps by a Puerto Rican-born filmmaker into a Hollywood filmmaking career. Soto began his entertainment industry career in Puerto Rico as a TV producer and then shifted to an advertising agency art director.

Soto made 13 short fiction and non-fiction films and virtual reality works—some of them as director, writer, producer, editor, and cinematographer—between 2009 and 2018. His VR works included Bashir’s Dream (2016) and Dinner Party (2018). Soto’s feature debut as director/writer/producer was the Puerto Rican-produced La Granja/The Farm (2015), which took four years to shoot and complete due to funding difficulties, and which premiered at the Austin Fantastic Fest and won best debut film at the Guadalajara film festival.

Angel Manuel Soto was director of his second feature and his first shot in the U.S., Charm City Kings (2020), co-starring Jahi Di’Allo Winston, Meek Mill, and Teyonah Parris, and backed by executive producers Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith, and James Lassiter; after its premiere at the Sundance film festival (where the film won a special jury prize for the ensemble), Sony Pictures Classics bought the film for theatrical release, which was canceled during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and then Sony sold the rights to HBO Max, which released the film on streaming later in 2020.

This proved to be Soto’s calling card for major Hollywood attention, leading to his next directing project with the first DC Comics feature centered on a Latino superhero, Blue Beetle (2023), starring Xolo Mariduena, Adriana Barraza, Damián Alcázar, Raoul Max Trujillo, Susan Sarandon, George Lopez, Elpidia Carillo, and Harvey Guillén, with the $120-million-budgeted DC Comics Universe movie (the first under James Gunn’s leadership at DC Studios) released by Warner Bros.