Before the world fell in love with Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys, the popular comic book series was nearly turned into a movie trilogy. It turns out that the MCU, and R-rated superhero movies such as Deadpool and Watchmen, could have been competing with The Boys in theaters if the idea hadn’t been dropped by Sony.
Adam McKay nearly directed The Boys movie in 2008
A recent report on The Boys reveals showrunner Eric Kripke’s plans for The Boys’s finale with Season 5. But it also reveals the canceled movie trilogy adapted from The Boys comics which almost came to be in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
In Rolling Stone’s report, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg explained their reaction upon reading The Boys comic in 2006. Rogen said that they were like, “Holy shit, this is f**king crazy. And that week we went to Sony and we’re like, ‘You guys should make this.’”
Goldberg added revealing Sony’s reaction saying, “And they were like, ‘We should…with someone else.'”
As a result, Sony acquired the rights to the comics, and multiple iterations of its script came to be. Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay helmed the project and had multiple ideas to incorporate into it, having a finished screenplay and animatics. However, it wasn’t meant to be as Sony pulled the plug on McKay’s take on The Boys.
Why Adam McKay’s The Boys trilogy was canceled
According to The Boys comics co-creator Darick Robertson, McKay’s film wasn’t approved because of the era it was pitched in. He said:
“I wouldn’t change how it worked out because the show is amazing. But he [McKay] was doing really cool stuff. It just came down to it being 2008, not 2018. I just don’t think they were ready for it yet.”
Eric Kripke, Seth Rogen, and Evan Goldberg’s The Boys series worked like a charm due to the fresh ideas that it offered at a time when the early signs of superhero fatigue were beginning to set in.
While McKay’s The Boys movies could have worked too, it’s also possible that his franchise would have been dubbed as one that was ahead of its time, similar to how other darker superhero takes such as Watchmen were received in that era.
