Everything We Spotted in Blue Beetle's Electrifying New Trailer

The trailer opens with Xolo Maridueña as our hero, Jaime Reyes. Introduced in the comics in 2006 and created by Keith Giffen, John Rogers, and Cully Hamner, Jaime is the third hero in DC canon to take on the mantle of the Blue Beetle. Much younger than his predecessors in the role (Dan Garrett and Ted Kord, more on them later), Jaime’s story radically overhauled the Blue Beetle concept.

In the comics, Jaime’s early adventures take place in El Paso, Texas—but the movie has created a fictional city, Palmera, to root the character in. Palmera City also very recently became DC Comics canon in the pages of the current miniseries Blue Beetle: Graduation Day, by Josh Trujillo, Adrian Gutierrez, and Wil Quintana.

Although the movie starts with Jaime working in the hotel industry, it looks like he’ll quickly be put in the orbit of Kord Industries—a major DC company with connections to Blue Beetle’s comic book legacy thanks to its founder, the second Blue Beetle, Ted Kord. Actually an acronym for “Kord Omniversal Research and Development,” Kord Industries is a scientific and technological corporation akin to STAR Labs in the DC Universe. While in most of its history Ted has directly led Kord Industries himself, most recently in the comics, and in the Blue Beetle movie, it’s managed by his sister, Victoria.

Jaime is given a mysterious package to safeguard with his life in an innocuous hamburger box—which in and of itself is a DC Comics reference. Big Belly Burger has appeared in DC stories since John Byrne and Jerry Ordway created the franchise in 1988 for The Adventures of Superman, and has since been established as one of the U.S.’ biggest fast food chains in the comics. The brand also made major appearances in the CW DC shows Arrow and The Flash.

Inside the Big Belly Burger box is in fact not a Big Belly Burger—but the alien scarab that bonds with Jaime’s spine, transforming him into the Blue Beetle. In the comics, this marked a significant change in the Blue Beetle mythos. Dan Garrett derived mythical powers from an ancient Egyptian scarab, while Ted Kord has no superpowers at all, fighting crime with his technological inventions. Jaime’s beetle is an alien being that eventually forms a bond with him after the teenager struggles to adapt to the creature painfully merged into his physiology, eventually learning to communicate with him in English rather than its alien tongue.

The Scarab, actually alien technology from a species of intergalactic conquerors known as the Reach—seeded across worlds to eventually adopt a host that can be turned into a sleeper agent for the Reach—eventually names itself Kaji Dha, a reference to the Shazam-esque quote Dan Garrett would shout to transform into the Blue Beetle.

As we see Jaime violently transform for the first time post-bonding, we also get a brief taste of the superpowers he has as the Blue Beetle. The Scarab, fused to Jaime’s spine, protects its host by creating an exosuit in dangerous situations, granting the wearer protection in dangerous environments, enhanced strength and agility, and the ability to fly. The Scarab suit can also create a variety of weapons for Jaime to fight with, including a blaster cannon, and as we eventually see in the trailer, a sword and protective shielding. In the comics, Jaime’s suit has also been able to produce magic-dampening energy discharges and even Kryptonite radiation, and its weapons are considered to be incredibly powerful. In and out of its exosuit mode, the Scarab also grants Jaime sensory vision that lets him perceive potential threats, as we briefly see in the trailer, and even detect extradimensional objects.

Early on in Jamie’s story, and seemingly in the movie as well, the Scarab often manifests the suit of its own volition, and it takes Jaime a while to actually control his newfound abilities. Eventually, after developing a rapport, the Scarab and Jaime agree on using an emergency mode known as the Infiltrator, where the Scarab takes full control of Jaime and develops a much more aggressive version of the suit unchained from Jaime’s own conscience, as a last resort.

The Scarab is an incredibly dangerous piece of technology, so it makes sense that there are people who want to do potentially very bad things with it—like Victoria Kord, played by Susan Sarandon in the movie, and actually created for the movie before she recently became comics canon in Blue Beetle: Graduation Day. Victoria is Ted’s older sister in the comics, and runs Kord Industries while he spends his days as a superhero.

The film’s other villain, played by Raoul Max Trujillo, has a much longer history in the comics. Conrad Carapax is a mercenary who first appeared as an enemy of Ted Kord in the ‘80s—an old rival of Dan Garrett, the first Blue Beetle, who found his mind infused into a seemingly-indestructible robot body hidden on Pago Island.

Given the shadow Kord Industries casts over this whole trailer, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing a lot of Ted’s time as the Blue Beetle even if Ted himself is not the star of the show in this movie. Case in point, as the trailer climaxes we get to see Jaime’s family take command of one of his most famous inventions: the Blue Beetle Bug, Ted’s flying ship and mobile research lab. In the comics, the Bug has been destroyed and rebuilt a few times, and fires solar blasts as well as tech-disabling EMP pulses.

The trailer ends with a brief look at what appears to be the inside of Jaime’s eventual base of operations—seemingly taken over from somewhere inside Kord Industries, given that we see the costumes of the two prior Blue Beetles in the background for a moment. On the left is Dan Garrett’s second costume from the silver age, while on the right is Ted Kord’s iconic suit.