The Boys‘ recently barreled through a fourth season finale with Gen V set to return next year and bridge the gap before The Boys‘ final season. The appetite for these satiric Supes continues to rage, however, and Amazon has officially greenlit the next spin off: Vought Rising, which will have executive producing powerhouses Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg onboard. That announcement dropped during this year’s SDCC The Boys panel from showrunner Eric Kripke with Jensen Ackles (Soldier Boy) and Aya Cash (the late Stormfront, shown next to Homelander above in The Boys‘ second season) revealed to star.
You might be wondering, though, whatever happened to discussions about The Boys Mexico? Kripke has clarified that the previously reported project has been backburnered for the foreseeable future and might not happen at all. Instead, he and Amazon made Vought Rising high priority while The Boys prepares for a sure-to-be devastating finale. With that said, let’s hop right into what has been revealed about what will actually be the fourth show (after the animated Diabolical series) about what Vought International has wrought.
Release Window
Timing feels like the most important subject to discuss first, even before plot and cast, because a prospective release window feels too important to ignore for crossover relevance to The Boys‘ fifth season.
Neither Eric Kripke nor Prime Video/Amazon have clarified a Vought Rising release date, although we know that Gen V will be the next series to unveil a new season in this universe. That will happen sometime in 2025, and The Boys will return in 2026. It’s possible that Vought Rising could surprise audiences before The Boys airs its final season, but it’s equally as likely that the next spin off will be planned for 2027. At the moment, writers are simultaneously working on finishing scripts for Vought Rising and also putting together the entirety of The Boys‘ final outing, so it’s possible that Eric Kripke and Amazon haven’t yet decided the order of release.
In other words, hang tight there, which is not the most illuminating news for those who want to see more Soldier Boy right now, but rest assured that plenty of of him is coming in both of the above shows. After all, Eric Kripke didn’t show off an “on ice” version of the character in The Boys‘ fourth season finale for no reason, and sure enough, he did tell Games Radar that there will be a substantial amount of Soldier Boy in the final The Boys season because Homelander’s psyche needs to go through more sh*t with his bio dad:
“You know, what we realized was we really hadn’t explored the father-son relationship much between Homelander and Soldier Boy. There’s a lot of material there, how soldier boy feels about Homelander, how Homelander feels about his dad, and so we really wanted to dig into that relationship.”
In The Boys‘ third season, Soldier Boy rebuked Homelander as “just a cheap f*cking knockoff” off the old block, and in the fourth season finale, Homelander appeared to be genuinely moved (was he feeling sentimental? ready to kill? both?) after learning that his sperm donor is alive, so we’ll see how Homie’s struggle against his desire for love continues to evolve/devolve when The Boys returns.
In the meantime, it could be telling that Homelander did have a relationship with Soldier Boy’s Vought Rising co-star, and whatever happens in The Boys‘ final season can only add further shading to tales from Solder Boy’s past.
Plot
Vought Rising will revisit the dastardly origins of Vought International from its inception, which was fueled by heroes including Stormfront (Aya Cash), who was revealed in The Boys‘ second season as a rabid racist and member of the Nazi party, and the jingoistic Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), who raised hell in The Boys third season, culminating in a high-rise fight, and also appeared in a Gen V cameo as a figment of Cate’s imagination.
As a series, Vought Rising will be “a lurid, pulp saga prequel set in New York City at the dawn of the 1950s about the humble yet diabolical beginnings of the Vought corporation,” as Jensen Ackles declared in the following panel discussion published by TV Line:
Aya Cash added, according to Variety, that she is “so excited” and added, “We got everything from Judy Garland to Joan McCarthy — how, I don’t know — I didn’t write it, but I have read it, and it’s really, really good.”
Paul Grellong will act as showrunner for this spin off, and he called the show “a twisted murder mystery about the origins of Vought in the 1950s, the early exploits of Soldier Boy, and the diabolical maneuvers of a supe known to fans as Stormfront, who was then going by the name Clara Vought.” He further promised, “We cannot wait to blow your minds and trouble your souls with this salacious, grisly saga drenched in blood and Compound V.”
A lingering question: How, exactly, does the series plan to deal with taking Stormfront and Soldier Boy back to the 1950s with the same actors? Eric Kripke hasn’t clarified that point. However, we do know that Garth Ennis’ comic books details how Supes do have a decelerated aging process. That doesn’t make them immune to the ravages of time (and A-Train props his speedy ways up with a Compound V habit), but it is conceivable that the magic of makeup could take both Aya Cash and Jensen Ackles believably back a human-based decade or so with that being the understood amount of aging that would have taken place in 70 years of Supe time.
However, it’s probably best to not overthink any time-related suspension of belief necessary to watch this show, instead, to hope that Amazon decides to let the trust the audience to still accept Cash and Ackles in the roles. That’s a much better alternative than the roles being recast (and Amazon obviously decided not to do so) or heading for the CGI de-aging paint set (the jury is still out there until an official statement surfaces).
Cast
Thus far, Aya Cash and Jensen ankles are the only confirmed cast members, and it doesn’t sound like we’ll see any time traveling in this project, but you never know, and further casting news will surely be coming from others 1950 Vought installments.
We should likely be grateful that this series won’t take place in 1980s when Soldier Boy was part of Payback because I really don’t want to see any time travel involving Seth Rogen’s cam-customer and Crimson Countess. At present, there are also unsubstantiated rumors of another Supe character, Flyboy, joining the series with no confirmation from anybody with actual knowledge of the series.
Trailer
While we twiddle our thumbs and wait for a teaser, there is never a bad time to rewatch Soldier Boy’s take on Blondie’s “Rapture” (including a sh*t-eating grin at the end) during a 1980s visit to Solid Gold.