Puerto Rican director Angel Manuel Soto has just been brought on to direct the superhero movie Blue Beetle for DC Films and Warner Bros. Blue Beetle will be the first DC film to star a Latino superhero.
Soto broke out in the industry with his coming-of-age drama Charm City Kings, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year. The film tells the story of a Black teenager living in Baltimore who wants to join a group of dirt-bike riders.
DC purchased the rights to the Blue Beetle character in 1983, but he has been around since the late 1930s. Three versions of the character have been used over the years, the most recent being Jaime Reyes, a teenager from El Paso, Texas, who finds a mystical artifact known as a scarab that gives him superhero powers via some high-tech body armor.
After the Jaime Reyes version of the Blue Beetle comic debuted in 2006, the character went on to fight Green Lantern in his own monthly series. He also teamed up with a gang of local superhumans known as the Posse.
“Black and brown people aren’t a monolith and I think it’s worth trying to tell stories that are different,” Soto told Remezcla in an interview late last year about Charm City Kings. “Particularly when talking about what we would want our futures to be [like].”
Soto seems up for the challenge with a two-word statement on Twitter Tuesday morning (Feb. 23).
Fans online were already giving their suggestions for who Soto should cast as DC’s first Latino superhero.