Anchorman director tried to adapt The Boys into a movie trilogy 16 years ago, but pre-MCU Hollywood wasn't into it

Homelander and Ryan in The Boys season 4

(Image credit: Prime Video)

Over a decade before the popular Prime Video TV show aired, The Boys was previously planned to be adapted into a movie trilogy by legendary comedy director Adam McKay, but the studio dropped it before it could even start filming.

The Boys co-creator and illustrator Darick Robertson confirmed this during an interview with Rolling Stone, revealing that McKay had plans to adapt The Boys comics back in 2008. "For a while, director Adam McKay was trying to turn The Boys into a trilogy of movies — the first one went as far as a finished screenplay and even demo animatics of scenes," said Robertson.

However, Robertson revealed that McKay "wasn’t able to get it greenlighted in a pre-MCU Hollywood," and that if McKay had pitched the idea just a few years later when audiences had a real hunger for superhero content, it might have worked out differently. "[McKay] was doing really cool stuff," added Robertson, "It just came down to it being 2008, not 2018. I just don’t think they were ready for it yet."

Mckay is best known for helming classic comedies such as Will Ferrel's flicks The Other Guys, Stepbrothers, and Anchorman, and ensemble comedy dramas such as Vice, Don’t Look Up, and The Big Short.

Alas, the movies never came to fruition, and in 2019 The Boys series was born, which all started when Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg got their hands on the 2006 The Boys comic. After taking the idea to Sony, Rogen found his showrunner in Supernatural’s Eric Kripke, and the wheels were put in motion, but that isn’t to say the team didn't go through a few rewrites of their own including character design. "I wouldn’t change how it worked out because the show is amazing," added Robertson.

Now on its fourth season, The Boys TV show is as outrageous as ever with secret Supe Victoria Neuman edging closer to the Oval Office, Billy Butcher supposedly on death's door, and the Supes as chaotic as can be. In the last episode, titled 'Wisdom of the Ages', we witnessed Homelander’s most unhinged moment yet where he turned the lab where he spent his childhood into a bloodbath, including lasering a man's penis off and forcing another into a giant oven. Yep.