The show, based on a comic series by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, turns the superhero genre on its edge. “Our show is the real world in every single way, with the one difference that the superheroes that everyone is worshiping happened to be real,” says Kripke. The “supes” in the show aren’t the courageous heroes people expect; one could even say they’re the conceited villains. They’re in a constant, rowdy fight against The Boys, a small vigilante group that operates under the radar to take down the supes, as well as their major corporate sponsor. But the show’s creators are interested in something deeper than just watching superheroes fight. As Kripke has explained, “What we’re really interested in is late-stage capitalismand white supremacy cloaked in social media and systemic racism… Real heroes just quietly get along, without any praise of getting the work done.” The first season of The Boys was well-received, but praise for the second season went into the stratosphere, with viewing numbers to boot: The Season 2 premiere garnered better ratings than both The Mandalorian on Disney+ and Stranger Things on Netflix. And that’s not all. The Boys was also the first non-Netflix series to crack the Nielsen Top 10 Streaming Shows list—plus, it scored an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Drama Series this year. The show even made former President Barack Obama’s list of his favorite TV shows of 2o2o. According to Kripke, the series made one critical change that made all the difference to its second-season success: It ditched the binge streaming model (that is, dropping all of a season’s episodes at once) and instead only released one episode per week. “We got into the conversation long enough that people started telling their friends and more articles were written,” he said in an interview this year. “I have no doubt in my mind that we would not be nominated for Best Drama had we been in the binge model, rather than weekly.” As if all that isn’t exciting enough, we still haven’t told you about the accidental phone call that led to one of the series’ most thrilling casting choices—plus, the shocking sex scene that’s definitely not happening during a little event called Herogasm. Keep reading to find out everything we know about The Boys Season 3, including the official teaser trailer, release date and more!
Is there a The Boys Season 3 release date?
Yes! Get ready to kick off summer with The Boys, as the first three episodes of Season 3 will debut Friday, June 3, on Prime Video. There’s eight episodes to the season in total; the remaining five episodes will premiere one per week every Friday after that. Season 3 started filming on February 24, 2021, which Kripke commemorated by tweeting a pic of a Homelander statue. Erin Moriarty (who plays Starbright) also marked the occasion by posting a pic with Jack Quaid (Hughie Campbell), captioning it “Back on our bulls***!” Season 3 production then wrapped in September 2021, an occasion Quaid likewise marked on social media.
Are there The Boys Season 3 spoilers?
Starting with the obvious: In a movie about people with superhuman powers, is Stormfront really dead? Cash seems to think so. “I had a wonderful experience on The Boys, I was always signed up for one year, so who knows?” she said in an interview. However, even if Cash doesn’t return, Kripke says she’s still alive. “No, she’s not dead! She’s Stumpfront! She’s a stumpy little Nazi. She’s actually not dead,” Kripke told TV Line in October 2020. “The best poetic ending for that character is someone who so believed in some kind of pure race finds herself mutilated and having to live with it for potentially centuries felt like a fate worse than death for her. So no, Stumpfront is not dead. Hashtag Stumpfront lives!” What about Homelander this season? “Homicidal maniac,” said Starr of Homelander’s future in Season 3. “That’s all I know.” The makeup crew has also ordered more fake blood for this season, and the revelation of Congresswoman Neumann being a supe will be dealt with. But Kripke has been spilling some major details on Twitter about two episodes specifically. Kripke was itching to get into Season 3 back in October 2020, when he tweeted out the title page of the first episode of the season, “Payback,” which will introduce Soldier Boy, a supersoldier, and Payback, a group of supers who predated the Seven. “One of the reasons that we’re getting into Soldier Boy [in Season 3] and that team, Payback, is we’re interested in exploring a little bit of how we got here [in the world today],” he told Entertainment Weekly in June. Kripke adds that in Season 3, they “dig into both the history of the country and also really look at toxic masculinity, and masculine roles, and what a [expletive]-show that’s overall caused. This whole fucking, independent Marlboro man thing.” Therefore, Kripke says, think John Wayne for Soldier Boy, not sweet-faced Marvel hero Steve Rogers. “As we’re writing him in this, we’re getting to really talk about the history of Vought [International] because he’s like John Wayne: He’s one of these guys that’s been around for decades of Vought history. And he was Homelander before Homelander, so he’s from a different era, but he’s got the ego and the ambition — it just comes across in a different way because he’s from a different time.” Now, about that sixth episode Kripke tweeted about: It’s going to be wild! After Kripke tweeted about it in June, the show’s own twitter account replied, “Keep teasing us like this and we’re gonna have a Herogasm.” This sent fans into a tizzy, but if you’re unfamiliar with the word, Herogasm was the subject and title of a miniseries spinoff of The Boys comics. Herogasm is the name of the yearly, supes-only, orgiastic festival sponsored by Vought International. The world is told every year that the heroes must unite to solve a crisis, but they secretly set off for a tropical location to engage in sex, drugs and other illegal activities, and… shall we say, uncommon use of hero superpowers. One shocking event in the Herogasm miniseries is that Homelander and Soldier Boy have sex with each other, but Kripke says that on the show, there will be no such Homelander/Soldier Boy sex scene. (This is sure to start some discussion in the Supernatural fandom: during the run of the show, there was talk about whether Jensen Ackles was homophobic without much evidence and whether the show itself, created by Kripke, was guilty of queerbaiting.) “There’s no topping it,” Kripke told Vanity Fair about Herogasm in August. But however titillating that title sounds, he says, “you never want to fall on the side of just being gratuitous and just gross. I don’t want this show to be irresponsible. I want it to be shocking and outrageous, but of a moral universe.” But wait, there’s more! In a November 2021 interview, Kripke said about Season 3, “Season 3’s fun because it’s not just about Soldier Boy, but it’s about the team he was a part of which is called Payback. And Laurie Holden plays Crimson Countess and there’s a bunch of other heroes who are amazing. So, sort of seeing who was the Seven before the Seven. And what was life like for Vought? In the history of Vought what was it like in the 60s and 70s and 80s? To dig into the history of the world, not just the present has been a lot of fun.”
Is there a trailer for The Boys Season 3?
The official Redband Season 3 teaser trailer arrived on Saturday, March 12, 2022. As noted on YouTube, the clip is not only rated “D for Diabolical,” but it also features the latest single from rock band Imagine Dragons, titled “Bones,” which was officially released just one day prior on March 11. For months before the teaser trailer’s release, the show’s thinly veiled FOX News parody, Vought News Network, broadcasted updates, fake commercials and fake news stories in their Seven on 7 with Cameron Coleman series on YouTube. One update mentioned Supersonic, who will be showing up in Season 3. And on Jan. 7, when the Season 3 release date was revealed, Prime Video also shared a brief, first-look teaser that shows what looks like a fraught photo op at Vought for Starlight and Homelander—along with an equally intriguing caption: “Payback’s coming June 3rd, and it ain’t gonna be pretty. Heads will explode, and not in the figurative kinda way.” A full trailer for Season 3 dropped on May 16, 2022. Homelander is seen having what appears to be a psychotic break while on a press tour, while Billy Butcher tries out a serum that turns him into a “supe” for 24 hours. We also get a glimpse of Jensen Acklesas Soldier Boy.
Which cast and characters are returning in Season 3 of The Boys?
In some of the biggest news to hit the small screen in a while, Kripke announced before the Season 2 premiere that Ackles of Supernatural fame would be stepping into the role of Soldier Boy. Ackles is coming off 15 years on Supernatural —which was created by Kripke in 2005. In fact, Ackles wrapped his The Boys Season 3 filming exactly one year after he wrapped Supernatural’s last show. “Fun fact for ya,” he said in a video on Instagram. “A year ago today, Sept. 10, 2020, was the last day on the set of Supernatural. Today, Sept. 10, 2021, is the last day on the set of The Boys. Coincidence?” But the 43-year-old wasn’t even on Kripke’s radar for a role on The Boys at first. “We had written Soldier Boy long before I cast Jensen. The majority of the guys we were looking at for that part were actually quite older than Jensen,” Kripke shared with Vanity Fairearlier this year. “But he happened to call me and we were just chatting and I’m like well I’m prepping Season 3 of the show, and I have this character Soldier Boy, and it was a real pain in the [expletive] to cast, and I haven’t really found anyone. Hey, wait a minute, do you want to do it? I sent him the script, and he’s like, ‘oh my God, I totally want to do this.’ Less than a week later, he was cast. He just happened to call that day, is one of the big reasons he got that part.” In addition to Ackles (and possibly Cash if she returns), the cast will be packed with new and existing Boys and Superheroes, as well as some new faces, including:
Karl Urban as Billy Butcher
Jack Quaid as Hughie Campbell
Tomer Capon as Frenchie
Laz Alonso as Mother’s Milk
Karen Fukuhara as Kimiko
Antony Starr as Homelander
Dominique McElligott as Queen Maeve
Erin Moriarty as Starlight/Annie
Jessie Usher as A-Train
Chace Crawford as the Deep
Nathan Mitchell as Black Noir
Laurie Holden as Crimson Countess
Miles Gaston Villanueva as Supersonic
Nick Weschler as Blue Hawk
Sean Patrick Flannery as Gun Powder
Giancarlo Esposito as Stan Edgar
Will there be more seasons of The Boys after Season 3?
“Much like Mork & Mindy spun-off from Happy Days—which is an insane and true fact—our spinoff will exist in the Vought Cinematic Universe, yet have a tone and style all its own,” said Kripke. “It’s our take on a college show, with an ensemble of fascinating, complicated, and sometimes deadly Young Supes.”
What happened in Seasons 1 and 2 of The Boys?
(Warning: Spoilers follow, obviously!) Season 1 of The Boys introduced viewers to “The Seven,” a collection of mighty superheroes who are contracted out by Vought International, a pharmaceutical company that makes Compound V, to fight “supe-terrorists” and other “villains”—some of their own design. The superheroes, led by the ego-driven Homelander (played by Antony Starr) are conceited, amoral and nothing like the selves they present to the public. Homelander, seemingly a Superman type, is the obvious star of the crew, joined by several other “supes” with differing powers. In Season 1, they’re joined by new recruit Starlight, who quickly starts to have conflicting feelings about the group she’s taken up with. The Seven are often thwarted by The Boys (well, men and one woman), a ragtag vigilante team headed by Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), who cannot stand “supes”—in particular Homelander, who he believed murdered his wife. Newbie Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) joins the crew after his girlfriend died in an event involving a hero. The first season found The Boys starting to investigate Vought International and their experiments with Compound V. Meanwhile, there was also conflict with “supe-terrorists” who were being used to prove that the Seven and other superheroes should be allowed to be a part of the military. The Vought exec in charge of Hero Management, Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue) revealed to Homelander that Butcher’s wife wasn’t dead, but raising an 8-year-old son in the Vought Witness Program. Homelander told Butcher the news, before revealing the second part: Homelander is the father of the boy, not Butcher. Homelander ended up killing Stillwell and takes Butcher to see the boy, Ryan. In Season 2, The Boys were wanted for the death of Stillwell and went into hiding for a time. Homelander met with Becca Butcher (Shantel VanSanten) and their son, hoping to teach him how to use his superhero powers. Liberty (Aya Cash) was a new sight on the scene, and she turned out to be a Nazi; her true name was Stormfront and she tried to push her white supremacist agenda through her superhero work. After briefly clashing with Homelander, they became a couple and he was eager to introduce her to his son Ryan. As the second season drew to a close, Starlight leaked information about Stormfront to the public and The Boys tracked Ryan down to where Homefront and Stormfront lured him. Fighting ensued; Stormfront choked Becca at some point. Ryan, summoning all the superhero power in his little body, smoked Stormfront with his heat vision, leaving only one limb, a torso and a scorched face. Unfortunately, the boy seemed to have also hit his mother, who died. When it’s all said and done, Homelander must give up Ryan, Starlight rejoins the Seven and the Boys come out of hiding. In a twist, Congresswoman Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) was revealed as a secret supe who had been publicly eager to investigate Vought, and Hughie is about to work for her without knowing that.
Where can you watch The Boys Season 3?
Next, This Is the Way… to Everything We Know So Far About Season 3 of The Mandalorian!
