The Boys is getting short film starring Billy Butcher that acts as a prequel to season 2

Well, well, well, if it isn’t a bloody cheeky surprise from The Boys.

Show creator Eric Kripke has revealed that Amazon will be releasing a short film starring Billy Butcher that will fill in the missing gaps between The Boys season 1 ending and the beginning of The Boys season 2.

“We are going to release a pretty substantial thing,” Eric Kripke told Collider of the project, which will be focused on Karl Urban’s foul-mouthed Brit, Billy Butcher.

“We had a whole storyline in episode 2 – it’s not really spoiling anything, season 2 begins with Butcher MIA [after discovering Homelander, Homelander Jr., and Becca Butcher] and then shows up. In episode 2, we had shot something that really revealed where he went and what his experiences were. It ultimately didn’t end up fitting that way into the episode. It made Butcher’s story a lot less mysterious and intriguing… it was better to not know in that episode.”

Yet, leaving them on the cutting room floor, for Kripke and his team, felt wasteful. An elegant solution arose: release them separately, though it still seems like a must-watch for those wanting to get the full picture in The Boys’ second season.

“But we had these scenes,” Kripke explained. “We strung them into a short film called “Butcher”… it’ll work as a companion piece to the show. There’s actually references in the show that you won’t understand unless you see this thing as it’s really tied into our plot.”

The Boys short film will release “sometime in the middle of the release of the series.”

In case you hadn’t heard, the first three episodes of season 2 will release on September 4, with the remaining five episodes arriving weekly thereafter.

So, with this Billy Butcher-centric short film, we're seeing more of The Boys, for longer. F**k, yeah.