But its path to a wide theater release was far from certain. Here’s how director Ángel Manuel Soto navigated film-industry shake-ups in his quest to bring one of comics’ oldest superheroes to the movies — and how he fought for its distinctive Latino perspective.
Soto’s cellphone didn’t stop “blowing up” while he was on vacation with his wife celebrating the end of filming, he recalled in an interview. His friends wanted to know: If Batgirl couldn’t survive, what chance did a lesser-known character like Blue Beetle have?
Then Gunn and Peter Safran arrived. Under the new heads of all things DC at Warner Bros., DC’s movie division became DC Studios, a name change intended to mark a bold new era aimed at reclaiming old cinematic glory under new leadership. Gunn declared “Blue Beetle” the first character that will be a part of his new “DCU” when the film arrives in theaters Friday. The message was clear. This Blue Beetle, a character more familiar to younger DC fans from animation, video games and comics, would be a part of DC’s future on film.
There have been three iterations of the Blue Beetle, who is one of the oldest superheroes in all of comics. The original Blue Beetle, Dan Garrett, first appeared in “Mystery Men Comics” No. 1 in 1939. The second is technological genius Ted Kord, who debuted in DC Comics in a backup feature story in “Captain Atom” No. 83 in 1966. Kord was created by Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko.
Jaime Reyes is the newest Blue Beetle at DC Comics and the focus of the hero’s first film (which also mentions the previous Blue Beetles). He’s a young Mexican American who builds a symbiotic bond with an alien scarab that imbues him with high-tech battle armor and the ability to create any weapon imaginable. Reyes was first introduced at DC Comics in 2005 in “Infinite Crisis” No. 3.
“I had done a lot of little drawings of things that maybe the [Blue Beetle] suit could do,” Hamner said. “And John and Keith looked at that and said ‘oh that’s cool.’…. We started really going back and forth a lot. A lot of mutual inventiveness. The mandate that we had was to create something new.”
“The all-new Blue Beetle not only differentiated his power set from previous iterations but as a Mexican American protagonist, his origin leaned heavily into his family and how they played an integral part of his hero’s journey,” Lee said.
With “Blue Beetle,” Soto aimed to tell a multigenerational Mexican American story that spans the many layers of the Mexican diaspora. He leaned heavily on the script of Dunnet-Alcocer, who was born in Mexico. “Blue Beetle” touches on immigration status, gentrification fears, micro- and not-so-micro-aggressive racism against Latinos within the American White gaze and features a villain with an origin influenced by some of the United States’ most brutal military interventions in Latin America.
Soto made sure there was also fun to be had. Puerto Rican actor Carlos Ponce (a friend of Soto’s) has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo for novela lovers. Mexican actress Adriana Barraza plays an over-the-top abuela with a secret you have to see to believe. There are comedic nods to the classic ’90s Thalía novela “María la del Barrio,” as well as a Spanish rendition of the Jackson’s 1978 classic song “Blame it on the Boogie” (“Será Que No Me Amas” performed by Damian Castroviejo). Pop singer Becky G provides the voice for Khaji Da, the Blue Beetle’s alien scarab that gives him his super powers.
For too long, “we have had other people tell our stories,” Soto said. “One of my first verbal negotiations with the studio was…if [Warner Bros.] is going to dictate how big the explosions are going to be, I’ll allow it, but you cannot tell me how free I’m going to be with expressing ourselves in our own effective way. And they allowed us to do that. They allowed us to explore our Latinidad in a way that isn’t forced, that isn’t what society expects. That we can make fun of the things we want to make fun of, but we also want to honor the things that they have never let us honor before.”
This content was originally published here.
