Anxious Warner Bros. wonders if y'all might like Blue Beetle more as an animated series?

Ángel Manuel Soto’s lighthearted superhero flick Blue Beetle had a lot of strikes going against it when it slumped into the box office back in 2023, fairly few of them the movie’s fault. It arrived amidst Hollywood labor issues that short-circuited its marketing; it landed smack dab in the weird interregnum between the old DCEU and James Gunn and Peter Safran’s shiny new plans for the franchise; it’s based off a title character who lacks the planetary recognition of characters like Superman and Batman—and, of course, it had a largely Latino (and uniformly excellent) cast, in a market that gets pretty leery, pretty fast, when presented with pretty much any flavor of non-whiteness in its mainstream Hollywood fare. Despite being funny and fast-moving, and featuring a great lead performance from Xolo Maridueña, the film was a full-on flop, just barely making back its relatively meager budget.

In the aftermath of the film’s release, James Gunn was careful to say that the movie was canon to his DCEU (unlike pretty much every DC film that’s come before), and that Maridueña would reprise the role at some point. Now, though, it sounds like DC Studios might try to pivot the character’s brand over to TV, having apparently put a new animated Blue Beetle series into development. Soto and screenwriter Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer are both on board to executive produce the series, while showrunning duties will be handled by Miguel Puga, co-creator of The Loud House spin-off The Casagrandes.

The open question, per Deadline, is casting: No contracts are apparently in place, so it’s still a question mark whether Maridueña, Adriana Barraza, Elpida Carrillo, Bruna Marquezine, Belissa Escobedo, or George Lopez will reprise their roles in the movie. (Fingers crossed for Escobedo, who steals multiple scenes as hero Jaime Reyes’ younger sister.) We can’t blame DC Studios for going this route, either: Jaime has had some of his biggest successes in animation, essentially serving as co-lead in the very funny The Brave And The Bold Batman cartoon from the late 2000s, and being a major part of animated favorite Young Justice. We’d genuinely love to see Maridueña’s version of the character get another shot at life, animated or no, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed for this one.