After Ezra Miller’s The Flash, DC has slated its next release Blue Beetle for August 2023. The movie was originally planned for a Max release but is now getting a global theatrical debut. Angel Manuel Soto’s Blue Beetle stars Xolo Maridueña in the lead.
The movie has a Latino background, and interestingly, Blue Beetle’s DCEU debut also marks the first Latino superhero to enter DC. And this fresh angle might save the DC movie. But the director had a different plan altogether as he was set to bring a Latino version of a DC villain.
Angel Manuel Soto Originally Pitched Latino Batman Villain, Bane
Angel Manuel Soto was far from Blue Beetle as he was planning on pitching several ideas to Warner Brothers and one of them was the Batman Villain Bane. “I wanted to pitch ideas, and one of them was the Bane origin story,” Soto told Den of Geek.
“I always thought that there was something interesting in exploring his reality and how a character like that comes to be.”
However, when he got a call from the studio, “the conversation was not about that,” Soto revealed. The studio wanted the director to embark on a new journey with a Latino hero, a fresh launch of a new character from the studio. “There’s this character that we’ve been developing for a couple of years. The Blue Beetle, a Latino superhero,” Soto said of the conversation with the studio.
Earlier, wrestler-turned-actor Dave Bautista showed keen interest in playing Bane. He even lobbied Warner Bros. for a chance to play the character. He is definitely not white as his mother is of Greek descent, and his father is the son of Filipino immigrants, making him the perfect contender for Soto’s vision of the character.
“I have had conversations with James about that but I think the direction he’s leaning in, completely rebooting that whole universe, he’s starting from scratch and starting younger and fresher and I think you need to do that,” Bautista told Insider once.
But those days are behind him now and fans may never see him as Bane. Bautista too is moving on and there is no update on bringing Bane back to the Universe so far.
Also read: Dave Bautista Reportedly Made $5M More Than Zoe Saldana in $2.3 Billion James Gunn Trilogy
The Origin of DC’s Iconic Villain Bane
Bane is DC’s one of the most iconic and powerful earthly villains. Many iterations of the character have appeared on screen but mostly, the character was played by Caucasian men. In Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin, Caucasian American wrestler Robert “Jeep” Swenson played Bane despite dwelling on the Latino background of the character. Tom Hardy, another white man, played Bane in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. But looking back to the comic book origin of the character, there’s a different story altogether.
Of course, Bane was not always played by white actors. In the 2004 animated series The Batman, Bane is depicted as a South American mercenary, played by Portuguese actor Joaquim de Almeida. Mexican-American actor Danny Trejo played the iconic villain in Young Justice. Argentine-American actor Carlos Alzaraqui voiced in the animated movies Justice League: Doom, Batman Unlimited: Mechs vs. Mutants, and Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
There are a few other iterations of the character but moving back to the origin, it is evident that Bane’s father was a man named Sir Edmund Dorrance, a British military officer. He joined an anti-communist rebel cell in the small nation of Santa Prisca, a Spanish-colonized island in the north Caribbean, and had a brief romance with one of the local native rebels. But he left the child and the mother after the revolution failed. Later, “the Santa Priscan government held his infant son responsible for carrying out his father’s life sentence.” So, Bane is mixed race in origin but by nationality he is Latino and he considers himself to be as he spent his formative years in the Pena Duro, the prison colony of Santa Prisca.
Blue Beetle will hit theatres on 18 August 2023.
Source: Den Of Geek
