The Boys was originally planned as an Adam McKay Before TV film trilogy

Darick Robertson, co-creator and illustrator of The Boys, recently confirmed to Rolling Stone that an early attempt to bring the comic book series to the screen was via a film trilogy from director Adam McKay. This was in 2008, before the launch of the Marvel Cinematic Universe made comic book movies the most profitable genre at the box office.

It all started when Seth Rogen and his longtime collaborator Evan Goldberg got their hands on the first issue of the comic book ‘The Boys’.

“We were like, ‘Holy shit, this is fucking crazy,’” Rogen said. “And that week we went to Sony and we said, ‘You guys have to make this.’ ”

As reported by Rolling stone: “Sony bought the rights to the property, which went through a series of incarnations over a decade before ending up back in the hands of Rogen, Goldberg and [showrunner Eric] Kripke. Director Adam McKay tried for a while to turn ‘The Boys’ into a trilogy of films – the first went as far as a completed screenplay and even demo animations of scenes – but he couldn’t get it greenlit in a hurry to get. pre-MCU Hollywood.”

“I wouldn’t change the way it turned out,” Robertson said, “because the show is great. But [McKay] did very nice things. It just came down to the fact that it was 2008, not 2018. I just don’t think they were ready for it yet.”

‘The Boys’ would finally get its adaptation as a television series from ‘Supernatural’ creator Eric Kripke. Rogen and Goldberg are producers. Now in its fourth season, ‘The Boys’ is one of Amazon Prime Video’s most popular shows.

Robertson revealed to Rolling Stone that an early concept for “The Boys” comic books was unworkable: “He envisioned the Boys as a team of anti-superhero investigators in the actual DC Comics universe, where the stories would imply, without ever outright stating, that characters as Superman and Batman was secretly evil and perverse.”

The idea morphed into creating new superheroes that satirized existing DC Comics characters. Homelander was modeled after Superman, the Deep was a variation on Aquaman and so on. An early version of Homelander was actually a superhero named Liberator, whose costume Robertson recalled as having “very clear nationalistic, Nazi-referencing symbolism.”

“When he evolved, I put him in the American cape because I love that line about how a villain’s last refuge is patriotism,” Robertson added.

New episodes of The Boys season 4 debut Thursday on Prime Video. The streamer has renewed the series for a fifth and final season.