Rolling Stone has published an interesting piece on how The Boys was brought to the screen, revealing that it wasn't always going to be a Prime Video TV series.
As the report explains, when Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg picked up the first issue of the comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson in 2006, they were immediately taken by it. "We were like, 'Holy shit, this is f*cking crazy,'" Rogen recalled. "And that week we went to Sony and we’re like, 'You guys should make this.'"
"And they were like, 'We should...with someone else,'" adds Goldberg.
While Sony did acquire the rights, a possible adaptation went through several iterations before coming back around to Rogen, Goldberg, and The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke. Anchorman and Don't Look Up helmer Adam McKay reportedly set out to make a movie trilogy, with the first instalment getting far enough along to have a finished screenplay and animatics.
However, he couldn't get it greenlit according to Robertson. "I wouldn’t change how it worked out," he admits. "because the show is amazing. But he was doing really cool stuff. It just came down to it being 2008, not 2018. I just don’t think they were ready for it yet."
We recently learned that The Boys will end with season 5 and, talking to the site, Kripke confirms he knows where the story is going.
"I have an ending in mind, I’ll say that," he teases. "I want it to be satisfying, right? I mean, you could count the great series finales on one hand. So it’s a real hard target. And I would want it to be emotionally satisfying but also surprising in how I’m delivering it."
As for whether it will be a happy ending, Kripke added, "Anything worth having is worth fighting for. When something good in the show happens, I always ask, 'What’s the cost?'"
In contrast to Game of Thrones, for example, the showrunner believes he's overseen "a moral universe where when you choose love, family, and mercy, good things happen to you. And when you choose vengeance and hate, that causes as much harm to you as it does to the person you’re trying to enact vengeance on."
In The Boys season 4, the world is on the brink. Victoria Neuman is closer than ever to the Oval Office and under the muscly thumb of Homelander, who is consolidating his power.
Butcher, with only months to live, has lost Becca's son and his job as The Boys' leader. The rest of the team are fed up with his lies. With the stakes higher than ever, they have to find a way to work together and save the world before it's too late.
The first four episodes of The Boys are now streaming on Prime Video.