‘Blue Beetle’ Director Talks About Chances for a Sequel

The newest DC movie and officially the second-to-last movie set in DC Extended Universe, ‘Blue Beetle’ is now playing in theaters. Unfortunately, this is one more of those cases where the quality of the movie is a secondary thing, and all eyes are pointed to the commercial result the movie will achieve by the end of this opening weekend. The movie grossed $3.3 million during the preview screenings, which is lower than both ‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ and ‘The Flash,’ both box-office failures for Warner Bros. and DC Studios.

There have been countless talks about the future of Xolo Maridueña’s DC character in the DC Universe franchise. As we all know, the DC Extended Universe will conclude this December with ‘Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,’ and the soft-reboot franchise called DCU will kick off with ‘Superman: Legacy’ in July 2025. Even though DCU will keep some characters and continue some storylines from DCEU, so many things are under a question mark, and James Gunn’s confusing explanations aren’t helping.

According to Gunn, even though the DCU canon will start with ‘Superman: Legacy,’ Blue Beetle is the first DCU hero, proving that ‘The Flash’ was a breaking point between the two franchises. Even though Gunn recently repeated that Blue Beetle would be a part of DCU once it starts, in the end, everything comes down to an old saying: “Money talks,” and the movie’s director Angel Manuel Soto is also aware of that.

The ‘Blue Beetle’ director is aware of what needs to happen for a sequel to happen!

Will ‘Blue Beetle’ get a sequel? That is currently a million-dollar question. James Gunn didn’t say anything about the sequel, but he swears that the character will return in his DCU. Xolo Maridueña expressed his hopes that he’s going to reprise the role several times already, and the director Angel Manuel Soto previously said how he hopes to make a ‘Blue Beetle’ trilogy. Still, these are all just words that could mean absolutely nothing if the audience doesn’t show interest in seeing the movie in theaters.

In a recent interview with Yahoo, Angel Manuel Soto was asked about chances for a sequel, and the director made clear what needs to happen for the sequel to happen — the movie needs to be profitable!

“The way the machine works, the movie needs to make money for them to put more money in, but for us, we’ve always seen it that way. We love the story so much. We believe in the product so much. We believe in an actor so much. We couldn’t help but think about where his journey was going to go while we were creating this film. So is it wish fulfillment? Are we calling it out to the universe? Sure.”

Angel Manuel Soto (via Yahoo)

Frankly, we want to believe that ‘Blue Beetle’ can pull off a commercial result that would be good enough for the studio to greenlight a sequel. We really do. But we need to be realistic and say that the numbers aren’t talking in the movie’s favor. We’ll need to wait to see official results after the opening weekend and how big of a drop the movie will endure during the second weekend.

The previous DCEU movie ‘The Flash’ turned out to be one of the biggest box-office bombs in history, and even though ‘Blue Beetle’ has a much smaller budget, it doesn’t speak in its favor that ‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods,’ which was filmed for around the same budget, also turned out to be a box-office disappointment. Warner Bros. and DC Studios are currently in a really rough era, and who knows when they will snap out of it.

‘Blue Beetle’ now plays in theaters worldwide.

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