The Boys is the superhero world’s most flagrantly adult entry — way more violent and generally R-rated than Deadpool, if nowhere as serious as Logan. But Season 3 sounds like it’s really pushing the envelope. Among the storylines the next batch of episodes will pursue includes Herogasm, a six-issue off-shoot of the comic in which some of our heroes, well, get lucky. And if everything they’ve shot so far makes it to the final cut, it would definitely be the bluest thing to ever grace superhero motion picture media.
In an interview with The Wrap, showrunner Eric Kripke discusses including the infamous limited series, which was published in 2009, set between issues #30 and #31. It finds Homelander (Anthony Starr) and team pretending to go off to fight an alien threat. Instead they go to an island resort for a weekend of super-sized sex and drugs. Kripke says when he first pitched adapting it to Amazon execs, he was met with a “sigh of resignation.”
It sounds like they didn’t disappoint:
“I mean, those dailies are insane … Like, if we showed everything we saw in the dailies, we for sure would be rated X. I can’t even get my head around what we’ve filmed. We’ll make sure that we’re walking the right line and that we’re outrageous, but not exploitive, of course. So there probably will be a lot of self-censorship. But anyone who is a fan of the books and that particular volume of ‘Herogasm,’ I can just tell you, you’re definitely going to get the full ‘Herogasm’ experience. There’s just no question.”
Of course, the X rating hasn’t been around since the late ’80s, and NC-17 never really took off like it should have. Streaming TV, moreover, doesn’t really have much of a ratings system in place. But maybe the Herogasm stretch of The Boys will fix that.
In any case, one of the main complaints about the Comic Book Industrial Complex we live in is that the shows and movie versions, at least, have pretty much no sex. No one’s horny, no one’s hot for each other, and no one ever, ever does the deed. (Well, Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool did get lucky.) This sounds like a bit of over-correcting — but maybe over-correcting is exactly what comic book media needs.
(Via The Wrap)
