Adam McKay Wrote a ‘The Boys’ Screenplay in 2008: Comic Book Creator Says Hollywood Wasn’t ‘Ready’ for Satirical Superheroes

Oscar-nominated writer/director Adam McKay almost brought “The Boys” to the big screen.

During an interview with Rolling Stone, “The Boys” comic book co-creator Darick Robertson revealed that McKay tried to adapt the series into a film trilogy. McKay even wrote a finished screenplay and oversaw “demo animatics of scenes” according to Rolling Stone, but the film was never made.

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“The Boys” later became a Prime Video series.

“I wouldn’t change how it worked out, because the show is amazing,” Robertson said. “But he 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.”

“The Boys” TV show is produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, both of whom also tried to adapt the comic books earlier.

“We were like, ‘Holy shit, this is fucking crazy,'” Rogen recalled of first reading the comics. “And that week we went to Sony and we’re like, ‘You guys should make this.’ ”

Goldberg added, “And they were like, ‘We should … with someone else.'”

And “The Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke, who previously created “Supernatural,” turned out to be the creative for the beloved series.

“The superhero trappings are literally just the suit it wears,” Kripke said of the show. “It’s about politics and authoritarianism and media, and an almost ‘Simpsons’– or ‘South Park’-like desire to parody things of the moment. And Sam Raimi ultraviolence. The reason I’m in genre, period, is because with monsters or demons or superheroes, you’re able to say subversive shit that all the people writing the classy-ass prestige shit can never get away with saying. And that, to me, is the fun of it.”

Kripke also recently told The Hollywood Reporter that he, Rogen, and Goldberg first began pitching the show in 2016 in the wake of Donald Trump being elected.

“When Seth [Rogen] and Evan [Goldberg] and I took it out to pitch, it was 2016,” Kripke said. “We just wanted to do a very realistic version of a superhero show, one where superheroes are celebrities behaving badly. Trump was the, ‘He’s not really getting the nomination, is he?’ guy. When he got elected, we had a metaphor that said more about the current world. Suddenly, we were telling a story about the intersection of celebrity and authoritarianism and how social media and entertainment are used to sell fascism. We’re right in the eye of the storm. And once we realized that, I just felt an obligation to run in that direction as far as we could.”

Kripke added of how the series has stayed eerily relevant: “It’s happened now almost every season, and we write them sometimes close to two years before they air and again we’ll find that the news is accurately reflecting whatever we’re talking about. It’s not a spoiler to say that first episode [of Season 4], Homelander (Antony Starr) is on trial. A big concern is ‘Can you convict someone that powerful of a crime?’ And what does that mean for the various supporters or the people protesting him? Did I know it was going to come out during Trump’s trial? Of course not. But we write what we’re either scared of or pissed off about. Someone asked me last year, about Season 3, ‘How are you so prescient with cops and over-policing in Black neighborhoods?’ Well, it’s been a problem for over 100 years. It was a problem five years ago, and, unfortunately, it’s going to be a problem five years from now. It’s always the same shit.”

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