[SPOILER]’s Death Was Not in the Original Script

Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for Blue Beetle

The Big Picture

• DC Studios pushed for an emotional death in Blue Beetle, which led to the death of Jaime’s father, adding emotional stakes to the story and exploring Latin American culture’s connection to death and spirituality.
• The death of Jaime’s father allows for world-building and delves into the idea of a personal low becoming a source of power for the reluctant hero.
• Although Jaime’s father is dead, there are still possibilities for Alberto to return in flashbacks or if Jaime has another near-death experience in a potential Blue Beetle sequel.

If there’s one rule that screenwriters tend to follow when it comes to raising the stakes of a story, is the one that tells them to make it personal. A superhero will be compelled to save a bunch of people from a burning building, but what if one of those people is their grandmother? This kind of thinking lead DC studios to convince Blue Beetle director Ángel Manuel Soto that they needed to up the stakes of the original script.

In an interview, Soto told our Editor-in-Chief Steve Weintraub that his and screenwriter Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer’s plan was to originally have “nobody” die in the movie. Turns out it was actually DC Studios that pushed for an emotional death, and in order to even consider killing off Alberto Reyes (Damián Alcázar), Soto had to sit down with Dunnet-Alcocer and come up with answers to some important questions:

“’How can we create the lowest of lows with the family member? And how that low is not just another death in the superhero genre, but how that low actually ends up being a power for him? At the end of the day, what is that push that this reluctant hero needs at the end of the day for him to embrace his destiny?’ When we started to understand that, we were like, ‘This could be maybe a good opportunity to explore magic realism in this sequence where Jaime is about to die.’”

The Death of Jaime’s Father Expands the ‘Blue Beetle’ World-Building

As Soto underscores, having Jaime’s father die also opened the possibility to explore another side of the Latin American culture that relates to death and spirituality. In the scene in which Jaime discovers that his father is gone, both share a conversation in “his vision of limbo or heaven or Earth.” Father and son inhabit “this construct of the thing you feel is home, and this home starts to break apart.” They also talk about embracing whatever’s next and celebrating a person for their accomplishments in life. Soto suggests that the more they thought about it, the more they realized that indeed “the dad has to go.”

We can’t forget that the death of Jamie’s father doesn’t mean we can’t see Alberto in a potential Blue Beetle sequel. The charismatic character can still return in flashbacks or if Jaime has another near-death experience – which is certainly within the realm of possibility for a superhero.

Blue Beetle is playing in theaters now. For more with Manuel Soto watch our interview below.

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