Blue Beetle Star Praises His Super Suit as Director Teases Community-Focused Heroics

Blue Beetle heads into theaters in just over a month and when Jaime Reyes arrives in the DCU, he'll do it with a seriously cool super suit. And according to Blue Beetle star Xolo Maridueña, that super suit is the coolest one there is. In an interview with Empire, Maridueña praised the suit and the CGI that fully brings it to life.

"The suit is just incredible," the actor said. "It's the coolest suit there is After watching the movie and seeing the CGI, I was like, 'Alright, now it's set in stone. It's the coolest suit.'"

Even with Blue Beetle suit being cool, it's a film and a story that is also going to be very much grounded in reality. Director Angel Manuel Soto teased that the film will have community-centered heroics as they build on the character and story's potential.

The idea was, for the first movie, we wanted to keep it as grounded as possible," Soto said. "We wanted the dangers to be more one-to-one. We wanted him first to be the hero of his family and his area and his community before he becomes the hero of the world. Before he becomes the hero of the universe. We didn't want him to save the planet from alien destruction on the first one."

Blue Beetle Director Wants a DCU Trilogy

With all this talk of a "first one," Soto is very clearly looking towards more Blue Beetle stories — and he's been open about wanting a trilogy for the character.

"Our first movie, the way we wanted to do it, was always with the mentality that we wanted to do two more, at least," Soto said previously. "And taking the traditional three-act structure of a story, we wanted our first movie to practically be the first act of a saga."

"We are part of the universe, we are part of the world, we are part of the plans that they have been creating for the future instalments of the DCU," Soto added. "But we are not tied to all the films from the past. Yes, our movie lives in the world where superheroes exist. But that doesn't mean that a certain event, or certain alliance, or certain things from the past dictate where our film is going."

What is the Blue Beetle movie about?

In Blue Beetle, recent college grad Jaime Reyes returns home full of aspirations for his future, only to find that home is not quite as he left it. As he searches to find his purpose in the world, fate intervenes when Jaime unexpectedly finds himself in possession of an ancient relic of alien biotechnology: the Scarab. When the Scarab suddenly chooses Jaime to be its symbiotic host, he is bestowed with an incredible suit of armor capable of extraordinary and unpredictable powers, forever changing his destiny as he becomes the Super Hero Blue Beetle. 

The film will be directed by Angel Manuel Solo, and the cast will also include Susan Sarandon as Victoria Kord, Bruna Marquezine as Jenny, Belissa Escobedo, George Lopez, Adriana Barraza, Elpidia Carillo, and Damián Alcázar as members of Jaime's family, and Harvey Guillen in a currently-unknown role.

"It's such a new world and this is my first movie, my first venture into being on the silver screen," Maridueña explained in a recent interview with Comicbook.com. "And so, getting to be a part of it all, I just want to be a sponge. I just want to learn as much as possible and have fun. It felt like there was so much anticipation and so much preparation going into the project that by the first day I was like, 'Dude.' It wasn't like the first day we started, we hit the ground running and it was a great time."

Blue Beetle is currently set to be released in exclusively in theaters on Friday, August 18th.