'The Boys' Showrunner Talks Being the Kevin Feige of Amazon's 'VCU' and Previews Superhero College Spinoff

"The Boys" showrunner Eric Kripke breaks down the Kevin Feige-style responsibilities of running Amazon's VCU.

‘The Boys’ Showrunner Talks Being the Kevin Feige of Amazon’s ‘VCU’ and Previews Superhero College Spinoff

As “The Boys” Season 3 finale debuts Friday, showrunner Eric Kripke and his writers are already hard at work writing Season 4, while Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas are reaching the halfway point in filming its untitled spinoff series.

As creator of Amazon Prime Video’s adaptation of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic book series, which he produces alongside Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Kripke is taking point on juggling the storylines throughout the Vought Cinematic Universe, a.k.a the VCU. That currently includes “The Boys,” its animated anthology series “The Boys Presents: Diabolical,” showrun by Simon Racioppa, and the Butters and Fazekas-led superhero college spinoff.

“The spinoff is almost halfway through shooting already. I think the overall goal is to start leapfrogging them, where, a series of months after ‘The Boys’ wraps, Season 1 of the spinoff will drop,” Kripke told Variety ahead of “The Boys” Season 3 finale. “And then a series of months after that, Season 4 of ‘The Boys’ will drop.”

A satirical take on superheroes, “The Boys” pokes fun at many characters that show up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — but has nothing but respect for its creative mastermind.

“I give credit to Kevin Feige — because we are doing that thing where, in a certain way, the spinoff is picking up elements of how our season ended, carrying that ball forward, and then the next season of ‘The Boys’ is picking it up because there are crossovers in characters and there’s a presidential campaign happening in the background,” Kripke said. “There’s just all these things in the world that we have to address and cover. That shared universe is fucking hard, man, because they’re ultimately all episodes of the same giant series. So making them all not just entertaining in their own place, but telling this massive meta-story moving forward, I give Kevin Feige a lot of credit. I’m going to send him a fruit basket saying, ‘Nice work!'”

Few details are known about “The Boys” spinoff series right now, including its title, but bits and pieces of the plot — which follows students at a superhero college run by Vought — have been laid out for eagle-eyed fans throughout the third season of its mothership series. The first was a moment when a picture of Jaz Sinclair, who stars on the spinoff show, appeared among images of supe kids who grew up at an orphanage for abandoned kids with powers. Another was pointed out to us by Kripke himself.

“Only a very, very small one, which is when A-Train and Blue Hawk are talking. Blue Hawk makes a reference to, ‘We both trained under Brink at school, and he taught us how to dominate totally,'” he said. “Because both of those guys graduated from Good Oak, which is the name of the school [in the spinoff], and Brink is a reference to the big superhero trainer at that school who is a character in the spinoff.”

In a recent interview with Marc Malkin’s “Just for Variety” podcast, Patrick Schwarzenegger, who also stars on the spinoff, described it as “‘Euphoria’ meets superheroes.” Kripke says that’s somewhat true, and somewhat not.

“It’s about kids who are complicated psychologically getting into trouble,” Kripke said. “So in that way, it’s like ‘Euphoria.’ I don’t know if it’s quite as dark, frankly, as ‘Euphoria.’ ‘Euphoria’ manages to be darker than ‘The Boys’ cinematic universe. They’re not shooting up heroin in the hallways of their school, I would say, for example. But hopefully we’re capturing something real about what it’s like to be a kid in this oversaturated media landscape we all live in.”