[This story contains spoilers for The Boys season four.]
The universe of The Boys is expanding again.
At Comic-Con Friday, Prime Video announced that it’s ordered a prequel series called Vought Rising that will star Jensen Ackles and Aya Cash, reprising their roles from the flagship series.
Ackles made an appearance on stage at Hall H in San Diego, and Cash announced the series in a video. Vought Rising joins The Boys, college-set spinoff Gen V and the animated series The Boys Presents: Diabolical in Prime Video’s franchise.
The Comic-Con panel allowed the main show to take a victory lap after an acclaimed season that also shared tragic parallels to real life.
The panel, moderated by guest star Jeffrey Dean Morgan, began with a spirited musical medley of Vought’s ice musical “Let’s Put the Christ Back in Christmas,” including a rap interlude from A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) that brought down the house. Creator Eric Kripe and cast Anthony Starr, Usher, Jack Quaid, Erin Moriarty, Fukuhara, Claudia Doumit, Susan Heyward, Valorie Curry, Laz Alonso, Tomer Capone, Nathan Mitchell and Chace Crawford were all in attendance.
Starr, who plays the Trump-like character Homelander, said the most shocking thing he’s ever seen in a script came in season four: breast feeding from Firecracker (Curry). “I’ve done a lot of strange things in my career. But that was the weirdest thing,” he said. “We’ve done some weird shit on the show … but it was the psychology behind it and it turned into a love scene.”
Quaid gave praise to his onscreen father Simon Pegg, whose charachter died tragically this season: “The fact that I got to say ‘you’re my hero,’ and not have to act, it was the best.”
The panel comes after the season four finale, which aired just days after the real-life assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life. The team changed the name of the episode from “Assassination Run” to “Season Four Finale,” and Amazon and the producers opened the episode condemning real-life political violence.
The panel was creator-writer Kripke’s first time addressing the episode following the assassination attempt on Trump.
The finale revolved around a potential assassination plot of President-elect Robert Singer (Jim Beaver), which Homelander (Anthony Starr) was orchestrating in order to install Vice President-elect (and newly outed Supe) Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) in the White House. But it ended in a surprise twist. Neuman had a change of heart, due to Homelander threatening her daughter, so she joins with The Boys for a plan to use a Supe-killing virus to end Homelander’s life. But in another surprise twist, Butcher (Karl Urban) kills Neuman, and the season ends on the show’s darkest note yet, with Homelander helping install the Speaker of the House to the presidency, and The Boys (except for Butcher and Starlight) rounded up as assassins.
“It’s almost as if he’s gone to the old Butcher who is very unforgiving and just needs to get the job done, which is scary Butcher,” Neuman told The Hollywood Reporter in a postmortem interview about Karl Urban’s character when discussing how the finale events will change everything headed into season five.
The Boys has become a de facto flagship franchise for Amazon, with the spinoff Gen V in production on season two, and the mothership series slated to end after one more season.
“From the very beginning, I wanted to wrap it out around season five,” Kripke previously told THR. “You can have your calm-before-the-storm moment, which is kind of what season four is for me. I say calm… you know what I mean. It’s about the characters and then you kick off into a climax.”
The fourth season is among the biggest series Prime Video has ever offered, according the Amazon-owned streamer. The company says 55 million people worldwide have watched at least part of the season, marking a 20 percent increase over viewing of season three in the same time frame.
Paul Grellong, an EP and writer on The Boys, will serve as showrunner for Vought Rising. Kripke, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, James Weaver, Neal H. Moritz, Ori Marmur, Pavun Shetty, Ken Levin, Jason Netter, Garth Ennis, Darick Robertson, and Michaela Starr are also executive producers, and Ackles and Cash will have producer credits. Like the other shows in the franchise, Vought Rising is produced by Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios, in association with Kripke Enterprises, Point Grey Pictures and Original Film.