What The Boys’ Finale Means For The Future Of Amazon’s Rebranded VCU
What’s next for Vought?
The Boys is over, long live The Boys. Eric Kripke’s satirical comic adaptation was meant to take down the superhero movie machine evident in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Cinematic Universe, and after seven years and five seasons, it came to an end with a bang, not a whimper, in an epic finale full of casualties from the satisfying (Homelander) to the tragic (Butcher’s beloved dog Terror). But while we’ve seen the happily ever after of these characters, the greater Boys universe is still going on.
In fact, in an interview Eric Kripke did last month, he even gave this world a brand new name. For a while, people have called this franchise the BCU, aka the Boys Cinematic Universe. But in a recent interview with SFX’s Jack Shepherd, Kripke clarified a key point.
“Speaking to Kripke this time, he briefly talked about the expanding BCU… or, at least, I thought it was BCU,” Shepherd said in his Substack, Bonus Content. “But I was wrong. Amazon clarified in a follow-up email after our print deadline that Kripke actually meant to say VCU, or Vought Cinematic Universe. In other words, the whole Boys enterprise has been renamed.”
The Boys Universe is now officially the “VCU.”
So what’s ahead for the VCU? First, there’s the spinoff that’s raring to go: Vought Rising, the prequel set decades before the events of The Boys following the first generation of heroes who took V1, the version of Compound V that stops aging. In fact, many fans were critical of how much time in The Boys’ final season was spent setting up Vought Rising, especially with the introduction of Bombsight (Mason Dye), who we will meet properly in the spinoff. The show will also feature Jensen Ackles as Soldier Boy and Aya Cash as Liberty, who previously appeared in The Boys as Stormfront. It’s currently set to release on Prime Video in 2027, so it won’t be long before we can return to the VCU.
But before The Boys Season 5, the college-based spinoff Gen V ran for two seasons before being canceled. However, that may not be the end for this story. A handful of Gen V characters appeared in The Boys Season 5 (albeit not as prominently as many fans would have preferred), so we know they are still around and fighting the good fight, and Eric Kripke has said that in brainstorming future projects, he will put effort into folding these characters in.
“We're internally brainstorming a couple different ideas,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “We'll see which ones get traction, but they all have the opportunity to absorb at least some of the Gen V gang, and that's very much by design.”
Soldier Boy will star in Vought Rising, a prequel spinoff series.
Finally, there’s The Boys Mexico, an international spinoff that was announced in 2023, but hasn’t had many updates since. Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna will appear in the series and serve as executive producers, and Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer will showrun. Aside from that, we know precious little about what’s coming ahead.
Eric Kripke has been very open about constantly developing ideas for new shows, but with these big expansion ideas, fans are starting to wonder if The Boys is living long enough to become what it has always satirized: making superhero shows purely to keep audiences engaged instead of taking down that very construct.
