The Boys Creator Now Thinks The Show Will Live Beyond Five Seasons
Don't make promises you can't keep. That was a pivotal and emotionally-charged lesson learned by the Master Chief in the first-person shooter video game "Halo 2," which has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of this article beyond this painfully forced segue. (Look, I'm going to need you all to cut me some slack on a Monday, okay?) But "The Boys" creator Eric Kripke has taken that same lesson to heart, as he's no longer sticking to his original plan for the most irreverent superhero series ever to grace the streaming airwaves. In short, expect "The Boys" to keep going for as long as the writers can justify the continuing adventures of Karl Urban's Billy Butcher, Antony Starr's vicious Homelander, and all the other fan-favorite misfits.
The new quotes in an interview with Inverse stand in stark contrast to previous comments made by Kripke. In a Q&A session hosted by Kripke on Twitter back in 2020, he once stated that he had a five-season outline mapped out in his head — although he included one all-important caveat, even then. As a showrunner on the hit series "Supernatural" back in the day, he had similarly planned for a maximum of five seasons ... only to watch as that juggernaut went on for a total of 15. He's not making the same mistake again, however, as he explained that fans will simply have to wait and see how the story plays out before making any concrete predictions. According to Kripke:
"I have since realized that literally no one in history is worse at predicting the amount of seasons of a show, like literally. I have learned my lesson and I've stopped predicting how many seasons these shows go. You will find out in hindsight."
Lessons learned
"The Boys" isn't going anywhere anytime soon. That much seems extremely clear, especially since we've known that Amazon had already greenlit a fourth season last year and now that the streaming service is officially moving forward with another season of the spin-off series "Gen V." But as if in anticipation that some fans may have been hung up on the possibility that "The Boys" would begin to wind things down in preparation for its endgame, creator Eric Kripke is playing coy about just how much is left to tell in the story of Homelander, Vought, and their fiercely anti-Supes rivals in Billy Butcher and his team of the Boys. This much seems obvious, at least: Unless season 4 throws a major curveball at us (and that wouldn't be the first time!), don't expect "The Boys" to end with only five seasons.
Although the Prime Video series has typically played fast and loose with its source material, adapted from Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's successful (but wildly controversial) comic books, there should still be plenty of inspiration for Kripke and his writers to pull from moving forward. The series ran for 72 total issues, along with a number of various spin-offs and miniseries. Between the success of the parent series and now its spin-off "Gen V," one imagines Prime Video is in no rush to close down shop just yet — not when they can goose as many subscribers as they can on the strength of the pitch-black satire, taking aim at the most dominant "genre" in recent pop culture history.
The studios playing hardball throughout the recently-concluded WGA strike and the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike has likely disrupted the timeline for season 4 of "The Boys," but "Gen V" is currently streaming on Prime Video.