A few years ago, Warner Bros. had a whole slate of DC Comics movies they were planning for release on the HBO Max streaming service. The most high-profile of the films, Batgirl, wound up getting shelved entirely by the company, and will apparently never be released at all, either at home or on the big screen. But the other, Blue Beetle, was shifted from streaming to movie theaters, and it’s now coming to multiplexes in the late summer of 2023.

The film, based on the most recent version of the decades-old Blue Beetle character from Charlton Comics, stars Cobra Kai’s Xolo Maridueña as Jaime Reyes, an ordinary guy who winds up with a mysterious relic known as “The Scarab.” It possesses incredible power, and turns him into — what else? — a superhero.

Check out the first trailer for the film below; it features plenty of looks at Maridueña in his Blue Beetle costume, which is very faithful to the version of the character from DC Comics:

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Here is the film’s official synopsis:

Recent college grad Jaime Reyes returns home full of aspirations for his future, only to find that home is not quite as he left it. As he searches to find his purpose in the world, fate intervenes when Jaime unexpectedly finds himself in possession of an ancient relic of alien biotechnology: the Scarab. When the Scarab suddenly chooses Jaime to be its symbiotic host, he is bestowed with an incredible suit of armor capable of extraordinary and unpredictable powers, forever changing his destiny as he becomes the Super Hero BLUE BEETLE.

Blue Beetle is currently scheduled to open in theaters on August 18. This film is one of the last that was into production by the previous regime at DC Studios, so how exactly it fits into the new DC Universe is not entirely clear.

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