The Boys Showrunner Reveals How Gen V Characters Could Return
Could we get a junior year abroad?
The cancellation of Gen V, The Boys’ college-based spinoff, was disappointing but not surprising. Yes, the series was only two years into Marie Moreau’s tenure at Godolkin University, but the story veered far away from the school at large and tied together with the fight against Homelander set up in The Boys. With The Boys’ final season ending in only a matter of weeks, there wasn’t really a justifiable way for Gen V to continue without it, at least not at the college where it started.
However, The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke says that may not be the end of the Gen V characters as we know them.
Eric Kripke was just as disappointed about the Gen V cancellation as the fan base.
The Boys, as a show, is ending, but as a franchise, it’s just beginning. New spinoffs are starting to pick up steam, including Vought Rising, a prequel focusing on the era of Soldier Boy and Stormfront decades before the events of The Boys. There’s also The Boys: Mexico, a series written by Blue Beetle’s Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer and executive produced by Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, that has been in development since 2023.
But Kripke isn’t limiting himself to just that. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he said that he’s already trying to figure out how to get characters from Gen V back on screen. “It's very early days, because we're focusing on getting Vought Rising out into the world, but Amazon has expressed an interest and they want to hear more potential stories in the world,” he said. “So we're internally brainstorming a couple different ideas. 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.”
In Gen V Season 2, Marie Moreau discovered she had the power to revive people, and Season 3 would have explored her learning to control this power.
That’s by design because Kripke didn’t have a say in Gen V’s cancellation, something he makes abundantly clear in response to fan backlash. “I did not cancel the show. One, I don't have the power to do that," he said. "Two, I was fighting to keep the show, almost more than anybody else on Earth. So I'm as bummed as everybody else out there.”
In fact, he was planning for a third season of Gen V and still wants to incorporate that concept. “We're still hopeful we can find a way to do it,” he said. “So, unfortunately, I can't share it." However, he did tease that the season would have explored "this idea that Marie is powerful, but that's not the end of her story. She has to learn how to control it."
So while Gen V as a show may be over and done with, its characters could continue on in other settings. And maybe that’s for the best: the college setting often held back the scope of the story itself, so escaping that could mean we’d see more ambitious plot lines than in a hypothetical Season 3. At the very least, it means we’re only starting the rise of The Boys spinoffs.
