Summary
- Director Ángel Manuel Soto pays homage to the source material in Blue Beetle through various Easter Eggs, including a Green Lantern nod and a reference to the Martian Manhunter.
- The film includes a playful reference to Bruce Wayne and Elon Musk, highlighting the larger DC Universe and injecting humor into the storyline.
- Despite some Easter Eggs being left out of the final cut, Blue Beetle successfully establishes its own unique story within the DC Cinematic Universe, with nods to other DC mega-corporations and superheroes.
Ángel Manuel Soto isn’t scrambling any Easter Eggs. No, the director of the new DC superhero adventure Blue Beetle is serving up a healthy dose of nostalgia when it comes to honoring the universe’s source material in the comic books. And there are plenty of nods to go around other than just that mid-credits’ scene that sets the stage for Ted Kord and possibly Booster Gold. Soto said in an exclusive interview with Collider:
“At the beginning of the title sequence, for those of you guys that follow the Blue Beetle comics, there’s a green light that hits this character, and that’s a Green Lantern. If you didn’t catch it, watch it again. Also, on the bug layer, and you see it also at the end, there’s a stack of Oreos, and who likes to eat Oreos?”
The answer is none other than the Martian Manhunter who is another member of the Justice League in the comic books. The superhero first appears in the pages of Detective Comics No. 225 in 1955. And at the end of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the Manhunter (Harry Lennix) reveals himself to Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) — who coincidentally gets his own shout-out in Blue Beetle. Soto added:
“The other part that we were having fun with is when they’re waking Jaime up with a Vicks VapoRub [laughs], the newscast is in Spanish, but it’s talking about Bruce Wayne. You have to pay attention to it, but it sounded like, ‘The billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne just bought the dating app for $66 billion,’ just making fun of Elon Musk a little bit.”
Even More Easter Eggs Were Planned
Director Ángel Manuel Soto’s Blue Beetle introduces moviegoers to the DCU’s first official superhero whose real name is Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña). And while the film does an excellent job of calling attention to the source material from the comic books, many Easter Eggs never even made the final cut of Blue Beetle much less got cracked open. Soto told Collider in the same interview:
“There was stuff that we wanted to do. Part of the technology that was being developed from Kord Industries, when we were starting to design it, we wanted it to also be part of the way the technology develops for Destro, for example. We wanted to, in the display box in Kord Industries, some of the stuff that we wanted there, we wanted to have like a Kryptonite bullet, or a Flash helmet. We just wanted to give some nods like Kord Industries has had a part in the bigger lore of DC, and those were the ones that they were like, ‘Nope, nope.’
“It is a very contained story. It is a new city for the DC Cinematic Universe, and we really wanted to make it feel like, yes, it is its own thing, but it still lives in the bigger construct of the DC Universe. And the same way that a lot of these mega-corporations have, we wanted to show the same thing, you know, LexCorp exists, all these companies exist in this globalized market. That’s some of the nods that exist in the movie. Jaime makes reference that, ‘I can fly, Superman can fly!’ There is an awareness that these people exist; they just don’t care about Palmera City [laughs].”
Blue Beetle has certainly proved that there’s plenty of room for the exploration of more DC Comic Book characters and their importance in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DCU. Soto’s movie is scoring well with fans to the tune of a 92% audience score, at the time of this writing, and a “B+” CinemaScore.
Blue Beetle is now playing exclusively in theaters.
