Summary

Blue Beetle is receiving positive reviews from critics, with an 86% Tomatometer rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics praise the film’s colorful and crowd-pleasing nature, setting it apart from other contemporary superhero films. The film captures and honors Latino culture, offering more than surface-level representation, according to one critic.

Blue Beetle is bugging out in the best possible way on Rotten Tomatoes. Yes, somewhere between the remnants of the DC Extended Universe’s old regime and James Gunn & Peter Safran’s DC Universe lies director Ángel Manuel Soto’s latest film offering. And even though there are only a handful of reviews from the critics available, Blue Beetle is starting positively on Rotten Tomatoes.

The superhero movie debuted on RT with an 85% Tomatometer rating, for its first reviews. Since Soto’s superhero adventure doesn’t begin its previews until Thursday afternoon at 3 p.m. EDT, it’s far too soon for either the audience score or CinemaScore ratings to be available. However, there’s definitely a lot of praise being offered up by some of the top critics featured on RT. Robert Daniels of RogerEbert.com wrote:

“This heartwarming, crowd-pleasing comic book flick is less serious and more colorful than the tonally dour mood of many contemporary superhero films.”

Movieweb’s own Julian Roman recently had the chance to review the movie, opening his appraisal with:

“The DC Universe gets a much-needed Latino infusion with a superhero origin story based on the importance of family. Blue Beetle breaks the comic book adaptation mold by giving a young Mexican protagonist the blockbuster popcorn cinema treatment. Xolo Maridueña lights up the screen with an endearing and awkward personality. He gets narrative help from a slew of busybody relatives who have his back when the going gets tough. This also works against the film, as one character in particular strays too goofy and annoying for my taste. That said, a winning combo of an encouraging lead, solid action scenes, and sharp visual effects deliver a fun summer ride.”

Reyes, aka the Blue Beetle, faces off against Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) in Soto’s first entry in the DC cinematic mythology. Gunn visited his friend Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside of you Podcast back in June. And he confirmed where Soto’s Blue Beetle film stands, in terms of his DCU. “The first DCU character for sure is Blue Beetle,” Gunn told Rosenbaum. “And the first full DCU movie is Superman.” However, it doesn’t seem to matter to critics which universe the character is a part of.

Related: Blue Beetle’s History, Powers, and Road to the Big Screen

Blue Beetle Debuts With an 86% Score on Rotten Tomatoes
Warner Bros. Pictures

The starting gun has been fired, and the critics are off and running with their Blue Beetle reviews. It’s very early on in the grand scheme of things, prior to the superhero film’s theatrical release, but the Xolo Maridueña-led flick is already faring far better than the other DC entry, The Flash, which opened back in June.

At the time of this writing, The Flash holds a 64% Tomatometer rating, courtesy of 370 reviews. But it’s not been all positive for The Flash’s competition, Blue Beetle, either. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times seems less enthused than some of the other top critics featured on Rotten Tomatoes. Roeper wrote:

“This is a mostly by-the-numbers origin story with underwhelming VFX, a disappointingly cartoonish villain and a final battle sequence and epilogue that follow the pattern of a dozen or more previous superhero origin stories.”

Yolanda Machado of Entertainment Weekly sided with the positive reviews, as opposed to Roeper. Machado said:

“Blue Beetle never loses sight of the community it seeks to honor, not once pandering nor offering surface-level representation of what it means to be Latino.”

Blue Beetle is currently tracking to make somewhere between $25 million and $30 million domestically over its opening weekend. Theoretically, and in almost any other summer than 2023, that would probably be good enough to take the No. 1 spot at the box office.

Interestingly enough, though, Barbie is forecast to bring in another $15 million to $20 million during its fifth weekend of release. And the two Warner Bros. movies may end up in a much closer race than previously expected, as they fight it out in cinemas. However, it’s most likely that Blue Beetle will finally be the one to dethrone Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster.