State of the VCU: “The Boys” boss on getting the ending 'right' and future spinoffs

Nick RomanoTue, April 7, 2026 at 7:41 PM UTC

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Jensen Ackles on 'Vought Rising,' Antony Starr on 'The Boys,' Jaz Sinclair on 'Gen V'Credit: Amazon MGM Studios; Jasper Savage/Prime Video (2)Key Points -

The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke discusses the pressure of ending the show in a satisfying way.

Kripke shares updates on Vought Rising and the Mexico-set spinoff.

"I don't think the shows have to be all that connected moving forward," he says.

The VCU, a.k.a. the Vought Cinematic Universe, is in a moment of transition.

The Boys, Amazon's R-rated superhero satire series that launched an interconnected world starting in July 2019, begins its endgame this week with the two-episode launch of the fifth and final season on Prime Video. Series creator Eric Kripke knows there's a lot of pressure to land this plane, noting "people retroactively will judge the series based on how they feel about the finale."

And yet, this is not the definitive end to this TV universe.

Gen V, the college-set spinoff, will still live on past season 2 (at least, that's the plan). There's also a Vought Rising prequel series with Jensen Ackles' Soldier Boy and Aya Cash's Stormfront that wrapped filming this year. Then there's a Mexico-set concept still percolating in the periphery.

Below, Kripke sits down with Entertainment Weekly to give a state of the union on The Boys as a franchise.

The Deep (Chace Crawford), Homelander (Antony Starr), and Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) on 'The Boys' season 5Credit: Jasper Savage/Prime Video

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You've been talking about your endgame plan for a few years now. When it actually came time to break the season, what was top of mind for you?

ERIC KRIPKE: Just how hard it was going to be. I asked and asked to have our series finale and then they granted it to me and I immediately was like, "Oh, dear God, what have I done?" It's so hard to land the plane in a way that's satisfying, and people retroactively will judge the series based on how they feel about the finale. So I really approached it with a proper amount of trepidation and apprehension because it made me really work twice as hard to get it right and not take anything for granted. I have no idea. We'll see. The fans will tell me whether we got it right. People tell me it's really good, but most of those people work for me. So I'm not getting a clear judgement at all.

It's fair to say there's a body count this season. Was there an alternate reality you ever considered where you didn't literally kill your darlings?

The final season always had to have a high body count. When you bring the conflicts to a head that we've been keeping on boil for a couple seasons, there are inevitably going to be casualties. Also, I think it's really important to make the point that there's no victory without loss. Victory costs something. If it doesn't and it's always happy and rainbows and everyone makes it out and high-fiving, then I really think you lose something, both the emotion of it, but also I think people sense maybe deep down, "Well, that doesn't feel honest without any consequence." So it was always going to be a bloody season.

When you think back to the "show Bible" you were putting together in season 1, how much of that is material that you're now finally, years later, getting to do in season 5?

A large amount. I think it would be a misnomer to call it a "Bible" and to say that we had this elaborate plan. We have a rough sketch. For reasons I won't bore you with, we went back and we started looking at season 3 and season 4 notes. It is remarkable how much of what we were saying as we were all figuring out the story and figuring out the endgame, how much of it we ended up doing, even though I don't remember any of those conversations, but clearly the good ideas stuck because we held onto them. So a lot of stuff we were talking about a couple years ago we ended up doing. It's a much more organic process. You have a direction you're trying to steer everyone in and an ending in mind, but that's it. You definitely need to give yourself a lot of space for the writers to surprise you.

Karl Urban as Billy Butcher on 'The Boys' season 5Credit: Jasper Savage/Prime Video

Can you talk about the evolution of your endgame?

We had a really clear notion, at least heading into this season, of where everybody ended up. We know what that last 15 pages is gonna be, set to the slow part of Layla: where everyone ended up and why and who lived and who died. We had a very clear notion of karmically where mostly everyone should be, and then it became a question of, "So how do we get to that?" A lot of the notions that became really important notions in season 5 came out of that room and weren't necessarily things that were written in stone.

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I kept finding myself thinking back a lot to the establishing relationships of season 1. Were you all actively thinking back to that, tying loose ends?

Yeah, we were, actually. The quote from my partner's other show [Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's The Studio]: "Everybody loves a bookend." Consciously in, wrapping everything up, we talked a lot about, "Let's make references to previous seasons and let's make sure we're tying up stories that maybe we had that we still needed to get to." Sometimes it was just to amuse ourselves, like the opening scene is the shareholders convention, which was Stillwell's [Elisabeth Shue] big introduction and the Deep's [Chace Crawford] big introduction in the pilot. Homelander talks to Hughie about the first time he met him at the Believe Festival, which the audience saw. There are a lot of those examples where the stories people are bringing up are specific moments of history of the show that the audience has actually seen.

I love all of the subtle and also not-so subtle nods to Vought Rising. How much of that material, without giving too much away, are you actively setting up events that are happening in that spinoff?

These things just sort of evolve. We started with "Homelander wants to be a god." Well, there are immortal characters in the show. That's Soldier Boy, that's Stormfront, there's these characters who got these early doses of Compound V. So what was that? Let's go back to the very beginning of what Vought was starting, which was not a huge concern of the storylines in Vought Rising, but we just thought it was interesting. So it all happened organically.

Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), Private Angel (Elizabeth Posey), and Torpedo (Will Hochman) of 'Vought Rising'Credit: Amazon Studios

Would you describe Vought Rising as basically that Payback episode from season 3 but in a TV season form?

I would define it as L.A. Confidential with superheroes. Maybe grimier. Probably, definitely grimier. It's a murder-mystery, and it's got that noir-ish — not Black Noir, but actual noir — movin' through the streets and femme fatales and detectives, but also heroin dens and gay bars and pill-popping and famous people. So it's got a real learned, fun, pulpy vibe that gives it its own energy. It feels like a Pulp Fiction-y kind of mystery-story.

I do want to ask you about the state of The Boys: Mexico concept that we've been hearing about. Is that anywhere closer to moving forward?

Yeah. They just delivered a draft of the pilot to Amazon. Amazon seemed to really like it and seemed to be making all the right noises. They gave some notes, so we're gonna incorporate those notes. Gareth [Dunnet-Alcocer], who is the writer, is so smart and good. He'll do, I'm sure, another draft. But it feels like...who the hell knows? You can never predict this stuff, but we're hopeful.

Derek Luh (Jordan Li), Jaz Sinclair (Marie Moreau), Keeya King (Annabeth Moreau), Lizze Broadway (Emma Meyer) on 'Gen V' season 2Credit: Jasper Savage/Prime

What does the future of this universe look like in your eyes after the mothership show? Like what SVU became to Law & Order, do you see Gen V as the new mothership?

I don't know. I think it's too early to say. These things will organically take their own shape. The main thing about the VCU, as we call it, the tone is the brand. I don't think the shows have to be all that connected moving forward. I think it's an interesting universe. It's really irreverent, and as long as we can maintain that irreverent, shocking, fun, emotional tone, then I'm open to any story in that universe, as long as it clears a particular bar of quality. The thing I want more than anything else is for the audience to say, "Hey, maybe this one was my cup of tea, maybe it wasn't, but it's undeniably good." Someone cared about it and they put passion into it, and it's not this cookie-cutter thing, that it's idiosyncratic and weird and it's somebody's passion project.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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