Amazon almost pulled The Boys’ season 4 finale, showrunner reveals

The Boys is a stinging satire of American politics and culture that confronts the real-life rise of fascist nationalism and the way America meddles in the affairs of other nations. But sometimes, parody and reality have lined up a little too closely. In the show’s season 4 finale, originally titled “Assassination Run,” Homelander (Antony Starr) plots to kill the newly elected President Robert Singer (Jim Beaver). This title name was dropped in favor of the generic “Season Four Finale” after Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally on July 13, 2024, less than a week before the episode was scheduled to be released on Prime Video. But it turns out, Amazon almost pulled the episode entirely.

“It created a lot of anxiety because I directed that one,” The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke tells Polygon ahead of season 5’s release. “I had a lot of emotional eggs in that basket, and there was a very real possibility that they were going to delay its airing. It went all the way up the chain to Andy Jassy, the head of Amazon, and he was okay with airing it. All that came back was, ‘Just change the title. It’s a tasteless title considering, but it’s different enough, and we will back it.’ Thank God that they did. I had a really stressful 24 hours, but it all pales in comparison to the madness in the real world.”

That madness has provided Kripke with a lot of material since The Boys premiered in 2019. The news is once again driving the show’s fifth and final season which sees the Trumpian hero Homelander running the U.S. with the help of supes running right wing talk shows and manosphere podcasts. Kripke says that he’s found it cathartic and therapeutic to have a place to channel his frustrations about the political climate, even though it “doesn’t feel great” that the world seems to regularly be catching up with his outlandish plots.

“Outside of the people, the thing I’ll miss the most from the show is reading a maddening headline and having a place to put it, knowing that I can process it with these writers, we could broadcast it out to a couple million people. I’m not saying it moves the needle or changes the world,” Kripke says. “But you had a place to process it, and now I don’t have a place to put it anymore, except to be frustrated like everybody else, and I don’t love that feeling.”

The first two episodes of The Boys season 5 will premiere on Prime Video on April 8. New episodes will be released weekly on Wednesdays through May 20.