Jaime Reyes is here to introduce a new hero to the DC Universe, but his new movie trailer also contains some intriguing references to Blue Beetle’s comic book history.
This morning, DC and Warner Bros. released the first trailer for Blue Beetle, Angel Manuel Soto’s former HBO Max exclusive superhero film that is now swarming the box office as the next big movie of… well, DC’s weird transitory universe phase right now. But its unusual placement on DC’s slate doesn’t stop it from making a strong first impression and dropping a few intriguing hints and details in its first trailer.
Jaime Reyes, played by Xolo Mariduea, is introduced in the trailer. Jaime is the third hero in DC canon to take on the mantle of the Blue Beetle, having debuted in comics in 2006 and being created by Keith Giffen, John Rogers, and Cully Hamner. Jaime’s story radically altered the Blue Beetle concept, and he was much younger than his predecessors (Dan Garrett and Ted Kord, more on them later).
Jaime’s early adventures in the comics take place in El Paso, Texas, but the film sets the character in a fictional city called Palmera. Palmera City was also recently added to the DC Comics canon in the pages of the current miniseries Blue Beetle: Graduation Day by Josh Trujillo, Adrian Gutierrez, and Wil Quintana.
Although the film begins with Jaime working in the hotel industry, it appears that he will quickly be drawn into the orbit of Kord Industries—a major DC company with ties to Blue Beetle’s comic book legacy thanks to its founder, Ted Kord, the second Blue Beetle. Kord Industries, an acronym for “Kord Omniversal Research and Development,” is a scientific and technological corporation similar to STAR Labs in the DC Universe. While Ted has led Kord Industries for the majority of its history, most recently in the comics and the Blue Beetle film, it is now managed by his sister, Victoria.
In and out of exosuit mode, the Scarab grants Jaime sensory vision, allowing him to perceive potential threats and even detect extradimensional objects, as seen briefly in the trailer.
The Scarab frequently manifests the suit of its own volition early in Jamie’s story, and it takes Jaime a while to actually control his newfound abilities. As a last resort, the Scarab and Jaime agree to use an emergency mode known as the Infiltrator, in which the Scarab takes full control of Jaime and develops a much more aggressive version of the suit unchained from Jaime’s own conscience.
The Scarab is an extremely dangerous piece of technology, so it’s understandable that people want to do potentially very bad things with it—like Victoria Kord, played by Susan Sarandon in the film and originally created for the film before becoming comics canon in Blue Beetle: Graduation Day. In the comics, Victoria is Ted’s older sister who runs Kord Industries while he is a superhero.
The film’s other antagonist, Raoul Max Trujillo, has a much longer comic book history. Conrad Carapax is a mercenary who first appeared in the 1980s as an adversary of Ted Kord—an old rival of Dan Garrett, the first Blue Beetle, who found his mind infused into a seemingly indestructible robot body hidden on Pago Island.
Given the shadow Kord Industries casts over this entire trailer, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing a lot of Ted’s time as the Blue Beetle, even if Ted isn’t the main attraction in this film. As the trailer nears its conclusion, we see Jaime’s family take command of one of Ted’s most famous inventions: the Blue Beetle Bug, Ted’s flying ship and mobile research lab. The Bug has been destroyed and rebuilt several times in the comics, and it fires solar blasts as well as tech-disabling EMP pulses.
The trailer concludes with a brief glimpse inside what appears to be Jaime’s eventual base of operations—apparently taken over from somewhere within Kord Industries, given that we see the costumes of the two previous Blue Beetles in the background for a brief moment. On the left is Dan Garrett’s second silver-age costume, and on the right is Ted Kord’s iconic suit.