One of the best parts about Young Justice is its ability to shine light on lesser known heroes, giving the sidekicks and outcasts of the DC Universe their time in the sun where juggernaut figures like Batman and Wonder Woman will not overshadow them. Heroes like Blue Beetle needed the series to give them the time they deserved. With the recent news that Blue Beetle will receive a live-action feature, it seems his spotlight is bigger than ever. While the DC Extended Universe has been hit or miss, if this adaptation wants to get it right, then it should stick to Young Justice's origin story.
Across the comics' continuity, Blue Beetle's origins have been told and retold in different ways, and part of what makes it difficult to easily convey his origins to newer fans is the fact the Blue Beetle is a legacy hero. Legacies come with a lot of narrative baggage in DC, as older heroes' histories need to be condensed or conveyed somehow in order to fully understand the position of the newer hero who takes their place. For Jaime Reyes, the new hero set to star in this movie, his predecessor is Ted Kord, a character dating back to 1966, but condensing that history is far from impossible, and that's where Young Justice gets Blue Beetle's origin perfect.
Granting the hero a pivotal role after introducing him in its second season, Young Justice wastes no time when it comes to setting up Reyes and delving into his backstory. In the context of the show, he is a skateboarding teenager caught on the outskirts of an explosion that sends Ted Kord's laboratory up in flames. A small device known as a Scarab latches onto Reyes' spine from the explosion, and when it armors him in a weaponized exoskeleton with an advanced tactical A.I., the leading theory is that the Scarab was Kord's latest creation before his demise in the explosion.
This is not the case as the plot of Season 2 unravels. The Scarab is actually a device from an alien race known as the Reach, who've sent out the devices to infiltrate foreign civilizations and provide the extraterrestrial conquerors with an advanced agent. Reyes' Scarab is "off Mode," meaning it suffers from a malfunction, leading to Reyes' compelling origin. Torn between his desires to be a normal teenager, help his friends and do the right thing, Reyes' often violent A.I. stands in conflict with his morality, and it's only through bonding to the A.I. and mastering it that he can defeat the greater threat of the Reach.
Perhaps even more notable is Young Justice's main villain from the show's second season, Black Beetle, whose presence in a live-action film would be fitting for such a deliciously evil antagonist. A member of the Reach who fully relinquishes himself to the Scarab, Black Beetle is a terrifying, powerful force whose depiction in Young Justice was better than any other incarnation of the character, so he would make for a memorable, iconic villain in live-action. Fittingly enough, both Black Beetle and many of Blue Beetle's origins in the show could all work independent of the team-centric series' larger plotlines.
Almost beat for beat, a Blue Beetle film could pull from the animated series and deliver the perfect origin story for a young hero. Superhero origins are hard to pull off in the modern day. After being done so frequently in the past, they're almost dispensed with altogether as superhero franchise's skip it and hit the ground running.
What Young Justice provides is the template for the perfect superhero origin that can harken back to the classics while giving audiences a storied world, an engaging hero and a chillingly effective villain. If audiences are going to get a Blue Beetle film, fans deserve one that does the character justice.
Directed by Angel Manuel Soto from a script by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer, Blue Beetle has yet to receive a release date.