At long last, Prime Video has given us a proper look at the final season of The Boys, ushering in the beginning of the end of a bloody superhero vs. antihero era this April.
While our first look at the final season of The Boys seemed to dismiss where its group of would-be heroes wound up at the end of season four, to refresh everyone’s memory, things are worse than ever before. For starters, Homelander is sitting comfortably as god-king emperor of the world, with the good PR Vought used to maintain falling by the wayside, as an army of radical supes has no problem with his genocidal plans for non-supes.
And, to make matters even more perilous for our heroes, Billy Butcher has some sort of killer symbiote in his body, has betrayed the crew yet again, and is on the warpath to commit his own genocide of supes. Basically, both sides of the aisle are dealing with extremes, and the most level-headed members of either camp have scattered to the wind for their own safety or have been kidnapped. But for whatever reason, the Boys are back together and are ready to finish fighting the good fight in whatever violent, gross-out way they can think of.
While this trailer acts as an arbiter for the beginning of the end of The Boys as we know it, that doesn’t mean Prime Video is done exploring its bloody universe. For starters, the first season of Gen V felt like lightning in a bottle, expanding The Boys in both tone and stakes with characters that weren’t all assholes in a way that didn’t feel like leftovers from its flagship show. Its second season, however, played a bit more like an extended epilogue to The Boys season four, a bit too much for our liking. Though, to its credit, the main thrust of its story dovetailed into the endgame of The Boys by revealing how its supe-killing serum came into being.
Outside of Gen V, the streamer also has other spin-offs in the works. One of which is a prequel series, Vought Rising, focusing on the halcyon days of Jensen Ackles’ Soldier Boy. Another spin-off that was announced way back in 2023 will take place in Mexico, though its name and logline outside of that still remain under wraps.
Understandably, in the lead-up to The Boys‘ big finale, showrunner Erik Kripke told Collider he and his crew have been in “absolute terror of becoming the thing we’ve been satirizing for five years.” After all, it’s kind of hard to be counter-cultural and punk rock when your early-season bit making fun of Marvel Cinematic Universe films aged terribly, with The Boys expanded into its extended universe of projects.
With any luck, the final season of The Boys will balance its own fanfare while not hewing too incredibly close to Trumpisms to the point that the jokes write themselves but be Saturday Night Live-style facsimiles of our daily lives, befitting the raucous beginnings of the franchise and the explosive finale.
The final season of The Boys premieres on Prime Video on April 8.
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