James Gunn holds his hands up to Superman’s viral flying scene landing with a thud – and reveals it’s not in the final movie due to not being a “finished visual effects shot.”

Back in January, some eyebrows were raised after a TV spot featured David Corenswet’s DC hero flying around a wintry landscape close to the Fortress of Solitude. Instead of looking like the finished product, commenters noted that it seemed to be down to bad CGI or special effects.

“There is absolutely zero CG in his face,” Gunn wrote on Threads not long after the clip’s mini-backlash. “People’s faces can look different when you put a wide angle lens up close. The background plate in Svalbard is 100% real as is David.”

Now, though, Gunn has offered more of a mea culpa-of-sorts in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly.

“It was a TV commercial and it wasn’t a finished visual effects shot. So the part of him flying, it was a photograph of his face and him flying. It was a photograph of a drone flying in front of an actual background. So all the pieces were real, but it was incorporated in kind of a funky way,” Gunn explained.

The Superman director added, “I didn’t love the shot, so it’s not even the shot that’s in the movie. Sometimes I’m pretty strict about when I’m going through a trailer and looking at each of the shots, but sometimes the commercials, I forget to look at this closely. So that one kind of got by me.”

Superman, starring David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, and Nicholas Hoult, kicks off the live-action DCU under the stewardship of DC Studios’ James Gunn and Peter Safran. Other projects in DCU Chapter One include Lanterns and the upcoming Clayface movie.

For more, check out our guide to upcoming DC movies.