Given the franchise’s success with fans and the general audience, Kripke now thinks that The Boys has the momentum to go way beyond its intended five-season run. In an interview with Inverse, he teased long-term plans for the show by referencing his unexpected success with Supernatural.

“I have since realized that literally no one in history is worse at predicting the amount of seasons of a show, like literally,” Kripke admitted, recanting his previous statement that The Boys would end after Season 5. According to Inverse, he had the same plans for his previous show Supernatural, which ended up having a solid 15-season run. “I have learned my lesson and I’ve stopped predicting how many seasons these shows go. You will find out in hindsight,” he asserted. Indeed, The Boys is so successful that its superheroes has since been ingrained in pop culture, now adapted as a playable video game characters from the comics and TV show.

Gen V’s Themes Distinct from The Boys

Kripke considered Gen V an opportunity to offer a different perspective to the social commentary that The Boys presented, saying, “It became really important that [Gen V] be able to stand on its own. The Boys uses its superheroes and superpowers as metaphors for the broadest possible social issues. It’s about celebrity, fascism, and authoritarianism. And so for this, we were really interested in the powers as metaphors for the psychological issues that teenagers are going through.” Despite the dichotomy, both shows are continuously being merged with plot turns like the crisis teased in Gen V Episode 6.

The franchise now has a gallery of deadly superheroes, revealed throughout three seasons of The Boys, and now the handful introduced with the spinoff. Kripke described Gen V‘s supes as characters dealing with inner demons. “We picked their powers to be metaphors for the issues that they were going through. Whereas in The Boys, we were like, ‘Justice League! OK good, time for lunch,'” he explained.