The Warner Bros. DC universe of comic book movies is about to welcome the opening of Blue Beetle but fans are not welcoming a tweet by the film’s director, Ángel Manuel Soto, who said he hopes Donald Trump is assassinated like President Abraham Lincoln.
Soto’s tweet from 2018 resurfaced on the eve of the release of the summer blockbuster he helmed. At the time, Soto wrote, “The only thing I hope Trump has similar to Lincoln’s presidency is the way it ended,” Bounding Into Comics noted. The tweet was discovered by comics commentator Lofti Pixels.
Ummm this is Blue Beetle director ὡ
Checks out… https://t.co/hCk4zTm1WH pic.twitter.com/Za0LA4AuBw— Lofti Pixels (@loftipixels) April 4, 2023
As soon as the tweet was noticed, Soto deleted it at about 4 a.m. on April 4, 2023 — a few hours after it was reposted.
That is not the only radical, left-wing tweet that the director posted.
Also in 2018, Soto tweeted that Puerto Rico is a “slave colony” to the United States, Bounding added.
It appears that Soto objected to Donald Trump’s election, writimg “You must be the dumbest piece of shit top cross twitter, right after Trump. How stupid can you be?” He then added, “Puerto Rico is a slave colony of the USA. Your passport was impossed [sic] on us, so there is nowhere else to go afer [sic] your country shits on my land and blame us for the stink. Fuck you.”
Previous to his work on Blue Beetle, Soto’s Twitter feed was filled with expletive-laden rants against the United States, mostly in Spanish.
Just in March, for instance, he tweeted “AmeriKKKan Dictatorship,” along with other tweets ridiculing America, the very place where he wants his film to do well.
AmeriKKKan Dictatorship https://t.co/zLPxzSQtHV
— Ángel Manuel Soto (@angelmanuelsoto) March 29, 2023
Soto also has thousands of retweets of radical left-wing political posts and causes featured on his Twitter feed and going back several years.
Yet, in a recent press conference about the coming movie, he was heard begging Americans to go see his movie so that he can do more “unapologetically Latino” movies featuring Puerto Ricans and Hispanic actors and characters.
“If you’ll help us and this movie becomes a massive fucking hit, we’re going to see a lot of those [characters]. That’s what needs to happen,” Soto said, according to IGN.
“If we want to see more variety and really celebrate differences, celebrate culture, celebrate other worlds because it’s fun. The lores are so spectacular. The only way is by supporting movies. Supporting a movie like this,” he continued.
Even as his tweets are telling Americans to “fuck off,” he also insisted that Americans need to see Blue Beetle to “start a conversation that allows us to be part of a global community and embrace each other’s differences in a way that’s exciting.”
The Blue Beetle character originally debuted in the 1940s and was published by Fox Comics. The character next appeared in the 1960s in a series by Charlton Comics. The Charlton characters were later bought out by DC comics but the Blue Beetle character was sidelined for many years. By 2006, though, the mantle of the Blue Beetle was taken up by Latino character Jaime Reyes and debuted during DC’s popular Infinite Crisis series. It is this iteration of the character that will be featured in the new film.
The Blue Beetle film, starring Xolo Maridueña (Cobra Kai) and anti-American comedian George Lopez, will hit theaters in August.
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