Just weeks after the second season of The Boys premiered, Amazon is doubling down on the franchise and are developing a spin-off series. According to Variety the new series will be written and showrun by Craig Rosenberg and is reportedly set at a Vought International college exclusively for young adult superheroes. The trade describes the show as a college show meets The Hunger Games with the same heart, satire, and raunchiness of the flagship series. They note it will be an “irreverent, R-rated series that explores the lives of hormonal, competitive supes as they put their physical, sexual, and moral boundaries to the test, competing for the best contracts in the best cities.”
Rosenberg currently serves as a writer and executive producer on The Boys proper and will executive produce the new series. He’s joined by The Boys creator Eric Kripke as an EP alongside Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and James Weaver of Point Grey Pictures. At this point it’s unclear which, if any, characters from The Boys might appear in the series, though references to Homelander and The Seven seem like a given.
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This specific idea of a college for supes wasn’t exactly covered in the comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson but it’s certainly something that could easily be explored given the extensive amount of supes that haven’t yet appeared in the Amazon series. One potential place that this series could take inspiration from is the spin-off mini-series for The Boys titled “Herogasm,” a parody of major comic book events wherein the supes run off to have a vacation and take part in unimaginable debauchery with each other.
News of a spin-off shouldn’t come as a huge surprise after the success of The Boys on Amazon. The series was already renewed for a third season before the second had even premiered, and Seth Rogen previously claimed it’s the most popular project he’s ever been involved with. Variety reports that Amazon claims the show’s second season “had the most-watched global launch of an Amazon original series ever.” The audience for the series has reportedly grown by 89% since the first season.
Perhaps the only group surprised by this increased popularity in the series are the audience members that have been review bombing the series’ second season. Despite a higher critical score on Rotten Tomatoes than the first season, some have been leaving one star reviews for the show on Amazon in protest over the show’s new release strategy. As opposed to the full eight episode drop of the first season in 2019, The Boys season two has been mostly released weekly with the season two finale set to debut in October.