Watching The Boys, one could easily come away from the show with the impression that series creator Eric Kripke has a bone to pick with the superhero adaptations that have fundamentally altered the shape of modern day Hollywood. In reality, though, Kripke’s beef is less about stories about caped heroes, and more about the messages those stories tend to convey to audiences.
In The Boys’ second season, the series takes more than a couple of brutal jabs at the likes of Marvel and DC with a subplot about the production of a big budget movie starring the members of the Seven, The Boys’ dark take on both the Avengers and the Justice League. The Boys contrasts the in-universe movie’s production with the abject monstrousness of its stars in order to reinforce the show’s overarching idea that fanatically worshipping superheroes and megacorporations is a societal harm. That’s something Kripke wants more people to understand.
In a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Kripke admitted that, while he found Avengers: Endgame’s ode to corporatized female empowerment to be in poor taste (it was), he actually enjoys Marvel’s filmmaking a great deal. The problem, Kripke explained, is that audiences are inundated with cape films, and the underlying message baked into the vast majority of them is somewhat unhealthy.
Read the article by Charles Pulliam-Moore in Gizmodo.