Did The Boys Season 3 Just Parody a Fan-Favorite Superman Moment?

Minor spoilers for The Boys season three’s first episodes. For the most part, Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys hasn’t directly parodied moments from the pages of Marvel or DC. Plenty of the characters in the show are analogues for them, Homelander being a version of Superman, Queen Maeve being Wonder Woman, The Deep being Aquaman, etc., but now the series appears to have done a direct parody of a major moment from DC Comics, and if it was a coincidence it would be surprising. Episode two of season three sees Homelander celebrate his birthday, taking part in a specific tradition, saving someone from a suicide.

In the scene it becomes clear that every year on Homelander’s birthday he “saves” someone from jumping off a building to their death, naturally all for the cameras and not out of the goodness of his heart. Unfortunately for Homelander, something occurs that gets his dander up more than usual and he seems to convince the poor woman to jump to hear death anyway (or maybe he pushes her, who knows). As comics readers might notice though this seems to be a complete inverse of the classic story beat from Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly’s All-Star Superman. In that scene the Man of Steel meets a young woman who is considering jumping off a building, comforting her in lieu of letting her fall. 

So was this intentionally done by The Boys? Signs point to probably not. While the series has gone out of its way to lampoon things like actual comic book movies (Batman v Superman and Justice League have been targeted on the show previously) it doesn’t often parody specific moments and characters that fans know and love. Series creator Eric Kripke even confirmed this when teh show first premiered, and they don’t seem to have changed their mind.

“There’s only so much we can do because of the real superheroes at Marvel, which are their long conference rooms of lawyers,” Kripke previously told ComingSoon.net.” So we can’t get too close (to real Marvel/DC Characters). And by the way, we don’t want to. And I will say that in season two, we do have one scene of superheroes that we’re clearly kind of poking fun at some existing heroes out there in the world, but only for like one scene. Any hero that we live with in the show, we really want to be their own animal and their own personality and their own complexities. I always said from the beginning, I mean, literally on day one, I think the first thing I said to the team as they were assembling is this is not a parody. If this is a parody, we’re f***ing dead. If people smell that we’re some Leslie Nielsen Naked Gun version of this show…If we’re that, we’re dead before we started.”

The first three episodes of The Boys season three are now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.