The Movie That Just Dethroned Barbie Offers Another Cure for Superhero Fatigue
Early on in Blue Beetle, the soon-to-be superhero Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) sits atop the roof of his childhood home with his sister, Milagro (Belissa Escobedo)—both of them fixated on the technicolor skyline of the fictional Palmera City. It’s a horizon glimmering with promise, but from where they sit on the outskirts of town, Jaime and the rest of the Reyes clan have literally been left in the dark. “We’re invisible to people like that,” Milagro tells Jaime later. “It’s kind of our superpower.”
In reality, Blue Beetle was released under a microscope. The first major live-action superhero film with a Latino lead, it’s not only carrying the weight of representing an underserved demographic, but also the obligation of proving that there’s still a future for superhero movies at all. And while a $26 million opening weekend—enough to knock Barbie off of the throne after its fourth week at No. 1—isn’t impressive enough to certify it as a hit quite yet, it is the first jolt of hope in a genre that’s recently felt like it was running on fumes.
Helmed by Puerto Rican director Ángel Manuel Soto (Charm City Kings) and Mexican American writer Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer (Miss Bala), Blue Beetle is vivid and colorful; it has a personality and a heart that’s felt markedly absent from the past few DC releases. More than that, though, Blue Beetle succeeds not by delivering an ambiguously Latino superhero meant to appeal to the masses, but a distinctly Mexican American lead—one whose extended family is just as critical to the film as he is.
When we first meet Jaime, he’s a 22-year-old college grad who returns home to a family juggling their pride in his accomplishments with the reality of their economic situation. They’ve been left on the fringes of their bustling city, forced to close down their business, and certain that they’ll soon have to sell their family home.
And while everything about them is clearly Mexican—references to El Chapulín Colorado, Selena, and Vicks VapoRub are all baked into their lives, and other things, like the family’s loving nickname for Jaime, Cabezón (meaning stubborn or big-headed), are included without explanation for the film’s English-speaking audiences—Jaime’s reality is still relatable to countless other first- and second-generation Latinos in America. He’s simultaneously shielded from major events in the family while also saddling himself with the expectation that it’ll be up to him to deliver his parents and grandparents from their problems.
Like its main character, Blue Beetle is bearing an unfair burden. Because of the writers and actors strikes, neither the movie’s writer nor its cast are allowed to promote it without crossing the picket line, putting the movie at a disadvantage when it comes to promotion. And while some have been eager to point toward its relatively modest opening weekend as a larger sign that it’s signaling the death knell of the superhero genre, it’s worth a reminder that the failure of Blue Beetle wouldn’t happen in a vacuum.
Latino representation in Hollywood, let alone in major blockbusters, has been abysmal for years. And even as recently as last year, Warner Bros.’ decision to scrap Batgirl—which would’ve made Leslie Grace the first Afro-Latina to step into the role—even though the movie was nearly finished sparked a wider conversation about whose stories studios see as disposable. Blue Beetle’s $100 million budget was significantly smaller than those of The Flash and Black Adam (both of which cost between $200 and $300 million) and even Shazam! Fury of the Gods ($125 million), and the movie was originally intended to be a straight-to-streaming release. That’s the environment it’s being released in: Latinos are overrepresented as moviegoers, buying 29 percent of movie tickets, according to a study by the Motion Picture Association, but they’re underrepresented on screen, representing less than 6 percent of characters. The industry is still less likely to bet on Latino stories.
In the film, this struggle is almost mirrored by the Reyes family. Tired of being invisible, and of being taken advantage of by the film’s billionaire supervillain, Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon), they join forces to prove that they’re not the afterthought she’s been accustomed to treating them as. The stakes are higher for them. They’re not just trying to figure out the new reality of having an overnight superhero in Jaime, they’re also trying to understand what it means for the already precarious place they occupy in their world. As Jaime’s uncle, Rudy (George Lopez), tells him, “People think crossing the border’s hard. You know what’s hard? The next 20 years.”
The film engages with ideas of assimilation, gentrification, and belonging, but it does so thoughtfully, without resorting to tired stereotypes about Latino families. Instead, it pokes fun at these stereotypes or even subverts them. The character of Jaime’s abuela, for example, might seem on the surface to be a typical Mexican grandmother, fretting over her grandson and lighting a vela for him when he briefly goes missing, but by the end of the film, she’s a full-on revolutionary whose comfort with wielding a weapon hints at her own complex past.
She, along with the rest of the Reyes clan, becomes instrumental to Jaime’s fight against Kord—one he literally couldn’t win without them. Their inclusion not only raises the emotional stakes, but it also makes for fight scenes that actually feel … fun.
Jaime’s family is central to the story in a way that makes it feel real. They’re there every step of the way to help him understand and process his transformation into a superhero. And they’re there for him to lean on when he sets out to save them. Over the course of the movie, we don’t just find a hero in Jaime, but in the entire Reyes clan.
It’s worth noting that while Blue Beetle is a breath of fresh air in DC’s beleaguered cinematic universe, it’s not the first major Latino superhero movie. That was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Into the Spider-Verse, too, became a hit, becoming Sony Pictures Animation’s highest-grossing movie at the domestic box office, and its sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, remains the highest-grossing superhero movie of the year. Like Blue Beetle, the Spider-Verse movies have also figured out how to tell a Latino superhero story without pandering, and to bring to superhero movies not just diversity, but new ideas. And that’s something that everyone should show up for.
