DC’s Blue Beetle is taking his first steps towards being the face of the publisher’s first Latinx-lead film, and perhaps the first Latinx superhero to hit the big screen in their own live-action movie.
According to The Wrap, Puerto Rican director Angel Manuel Soto (director of HBO Max’s Charm City Kings) will bring the Blue Beetle movie to life. The film is set to start production this fall with a script by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer. It will follow Jaime Reyes, the third character to bear the name Blue Beetle.
Created by Keith Giffen, John Rogers, and Cully Hamner in the 2006 miniseries Infinite Crisis, Jaime Reyes is a Mexican-American teenager with a pretty gnarly superhero origin story: he finds an alien artifact called the Scarab that attaches itself to his spine while he sleeps, giving him creepy-cool body armor and an assortment of superpowers that he is quite bad at using.
Since then, Reyes has remained a steady presence in DC comic books despite being in a bit of a dormant period; his most recent solo series wrapped in 2018, and he isn’t yet prominently featured in current series. The Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle has also been a steady presence on TV, showing up in multiple animated series like Batman The Brave and the Bold and Young Justice: Invasion. You can also catch him in the video game Injustice 2, and in one goofy live-action appearance on Smallville.
Should Blue Beetle continue as planned, this would make for the first standalone superhero movie about a Latinx character that’s also written and directed by Latinx filmmakers, another milestone in superhero cinema’s slow march towards diversifying its landscape.(Interestingly, the movie would also make for the first time a Reyes solo story was written by a Latinx writer.)
No star is currently attached, nor is there any word on whether Blue Beetle is bound for theatrical release or HBO Max.
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