Warning: a MAJOR SPOILER for Blue Beetle is ahead! If you want to go into this movie as freshly as possible, then read another one of our fine articles.
17 years after he was introduced in the pages of Infinite Crisis #3, and following numerous appearances in TV shows, direct-to-video animated movies and video games, Jaime Reyes is now just weeks away from making his live-action, theatrical debut. Blue Beetle is next up on the upcoming DC movies slate, with Cobra Kai’s Xolo Maridueña leading the charge as Jaime. However, with a little over a month until Blue Beetle’s release, it looks as though the actor and director Angel Manuel Soto has already dropped a huge spoiler.
This is your final Blue Beetle SPOILER warning. Are we all good here? Then let’s proceed.
Maridueña and Soto were being interviewed by MovieMaker, and one of the topics brought up was how the movie apparently sees Jaime’s father Alberto Reyes, played by Damián Alcázar, dying. While the details surrounding Alberto’s demise aren’t shared, the interviewer, Joshua Encinas, noted how it reminded him of his own father’s death, and in the morning before he watched Blue Beetle for the first time, he’d thought to himself, “What if I saw dad’s spirit right now in the living room?” That led Soto to say the following:
No way. I’m getting goosebumps as you say that. That scene is close to my heart. I have not gone through the hardship that you went through, I can only imagine. And just imagining it, it’s heartbreaking for me. But your reaction was exactly what we were trying to achieve.
For his part, Xolo Maridueña described this moment in Blue Beetle as his favorite part of the movie, sharing that Damián Alcázar was “so generous and wise and calm,” and that he remembered thinking it was “ethereal” that Jaime sees his father later on in the movie, but “just his soul. It wasn’t his body.” So evidently even after Alberto dies, somehow his soul is present for his son to see before it passes on to the great beyond. Maridueña then added:
Jaime didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to his father. I want people to understand that if you have your parents, just hug them, because you never know when it’s the last time.
While it’s surprising that Maridueña and Soto are this open about one of Blue Beetle’s major plot points so far ahead of its release, this isn’t the only DC movie released in 2023 that’s been subjected to a major spoiler from one of its attached talents prior to hitting the big screen. Back in late May, a few weeks ahead of The Flash’s arrival, director Andy Muschietti spilled that Nicolas Cage cameoed as Superman in the Scarlet Speedster’s standalone movie. This served as a nod to how the National Treasure actor was supposed to play the Man of Steel in the late ‘90s under Tim Burton’s direction for the never-made Superman Lives.
We’ll have to wait and see to learn how Alberto Reyes meets his end in Blue Beetle, although my money’s on it happening during Jaime’s conflict with villains like Susan Sarandon’s Victoria Lord and Raoul Max Trujillo’s Carapax the Indestructible Man rather than of natural causes. Blue Beetle’s cast also includes talent like George Lopez, Adriana Barraza, Elpidia Carrillo, Belissa Escobedo, Bruna Marquezine, Harvey Guillén and Becky G. Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer wrote the script.
Blue Beetle comes out on August 18, and while it remains to be seen if it will spawn a sequel, DC Studios co-head James Gunn did reveal that Jaime Reyes is the new DC Universe’s first character. If you’d like to revisit Jaime’s past appearances outside of the comics, many of those can be viewed with a Max subscription.
