Published May 8, 2026, 10:00 a.m. ET For the most part, the octopus featured in Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures movie—which began streaming today—is CGI. “There was no way we were going to be able to train an octopus to do all the very specific blocking that we needed in the movie,” director Olivia Newman explained with a laugh, in a recent zoom interview with Decider . “We settled on creating a CGI version of Marcellus.” But even though Marcellus the octopus is computer generated, he was designed after a real-life octopus named Agnetha, who lives at the Vancouver Aquarium. “[We used] footage of Agnetha interchangeably in the movie, with our CGI,” Newman explained. Alongside co-writer John Whittington, Newman adapted the Remarkably Bright Creatures script from the best-selling 2022 novel by Shelby Van Pelt, about a lonely widow named Tova (played by Sally Field, also an executive producer on the film), who is still grappling with the death of her son, decades later.…