Anxious Warner Bros. wonders if y'all might like Blue Beetle more as an animated series?
The fun but fiscally disastrous 2023 flop might get a second life as animated TV
Ángel Manuel Soto’s lighthearted superhero flick Blue Beetle had a lot of strikes going against it when it slumped into the box office back in 2023, fairly few of them the movie’s fault. It arrived amidst Hollywood labor issues that short-circuited its marketing; it landed smack dab in the weird interregnum between the old DCEU and James Gunn and Peter Safran’s shiny new plans for the franchise; it’s based off a title character who lacks the planetary recognition of characters like Superman and Batman—and, of course, it had a largely Latino (and uniformly excellent) cast, in a market that gets pretty leery, pretty fast, when presented with pretty much any flavor of non-whiteness in its mainstream Hollywood fare. Despite being funny and fast-moving, and featuring a great lead performance from Xolo Maridueña, the film was a full-on flop, just barely making back its relatively meager budget.