‘Blue Beetle’ secretly plants the seeds for James Gunn’s DCU ‘Justice League’ movie

Blue Beetle is crashing harder at the box office than Jaime Reyes through his own roof when he first dons his super-suit, but thankfully the film has one powerful champion in its corner. James Gunn, who serves as DC Studios co-CEO alongside Peter Safran (who also produced Blue Beetle), has confirmed that he considers Jaime the first official character in his shiny, new DCU, despite having nothing to do with this movie himself. Maybe, just maybe, because he sees the potential in the film’s villain.

While Susan Sarandon’s Victoria Kord, Ted Kord’s evil sister, is an original creation for the screen (although she’s slightly reminiscent of Veronica Cale), her armored minion Carapax is a combination of two comic book antagonists: Carapax the Indestructible Man and OMAC. As depicted in Blue Beetle, OMAX (One Man Army Corps) is Victoria’s idea for an entire legion of cyborg warriors. While she fails to realize her vision, this apocalyptic threat could come to pass in a future Justice League flick. And it could all be Batman’s fault.

In DC’s Infinite Crisis event, Batman created the Brother Eye A.I. satellite as a failsafe in case his metahuman buddies ever broke bad. Unfortunately, his creation was corrupted by Maxwell Lord (working for Alexander Luthor Jr.) who reprogrammed it to fear all metahumans. Brother Eye, you see, was in control of The OMAC Project, an evolution of the original OMAC that took the form of a nanotech virus that could turn a regular person into a cyborg soldier when activated. A collaboration between the U.S. Department of Defense and Lexcorp, 1,373,462 citizens were infected with the virus through vaccines.

When Brother Eye launched its attack on the world, it activated these million OMACs and suddenly had its very own army, leaving Batman to attempt to undo his mistake by leading the Justice League to destroy the machine and its unstoppable army. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like the perfect plot for the DCU’s first Justice League movie to me, especially as it would be a natural sequel to Superman: Legacy and The Brave and the Bold, which will introduce the DCU’s Batman.

With Blue Beetle, Gunn was lucky enough to inherit a hero with a clean slate that he could easily fold into his upcoming plans. But thanks to the inclusion of OMAC, he may just have been handed the answer to the mystery of how to possible make another Justice League after Zack Snyder already nabbed Darkseid. The solution? Introduce the DCU’s very own Ultron in the form of Brother Eye. Box office bomb or not, Blue Beetle could still shift its weight when it comes to DC’s future.