Angel Manuel Soto Originally Wanted to Make a Bane Origin Film Before He Was Offered Blue Beetle

Bane could have been the summer’s follow-up to The Flash for DC if director Angel Manuel Soto had gotten his way. Soto is helming the upcoming movie debut of the superhero known as the Blue Beetle. Xolo Maridueña (Cobra Kai’s very own “bad ass” Miguel) will suit up for the role. However, the Blue Beetle film could have easily been a project focusing on Bane’s origin story, something that would certainly have provided a very different release this August and may not have even made it based on Warner Bros. clear out last year.

Soto said in an interview with Den of Geek:

I wanted to pitch ideas, and one of them was the Bane origin story. I always thought that there was something interesting in exploring his reality and how a character like that comes to be. The conversation was not about that. [The studio said], ‘There’s this character that we’ve been developing for a couple of years. The Blue Beetle, a Latino superhero.’

Bane is one of the most dangerous opponents ever created in DC’s source material to go up against Bruce Wayne’s alter ego. The masked baddie, who doses himself with venom to achieve his super strength, first appeared in the pages of Batman: Vengeance of Bane (1992). However, the supervillain rose to prominence in the Knightfall comic books which ran from 1993 until 1994. And it’s during that storyline that Bane famously breaks the Dark Knight in Batman No. 497.

Related: Blue Beetle: How the Superhero Compares to His Comic Counterpart

Soto wanted to pitch Bane’s origin prior to landing Blue Beetle

Director Angel Manuel Soto went into his talks for Blue Beetle ready to pitch a Bane origin story, but he never got a chance to make another Bane-related film. During his first ever appearance on the big screen in Batman & Robin (1997), Bane (Jeep Swenson) is represented as a scrawny man who is transformed into a mindless, zombie-like thug who does the bidding of Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman).

Bane (Tom Hardy) received a much better representation in Christopher Nolan’s billion-dollar box office smash, The Dark Knight Rises. In the final installment in The Dark Knight Trilogy, it seems that Bane is the mastermind until the film’s third act when it actually turns out that Talia al Ghul (Marion Cotillard) has been pulling the strings all along.

In the end, though, Soto was selected to tell the story of Jaime Reyes, aka the Blue Beetle, rather than tackle a Bane origin story. While Superman: Legacy (2025) has been touted as officially being the first film in the upcoming DCU, James Gunn went on record and said that the Blue Beetle is indeed a character in his and Peter Safran’s world of Detective Comics brought to life.

Blue Beetle opens in theaters on Friday, August 18.