There’s been a lot of talk, in recent years, about the economics of big, flashy prestige TV, and how all the problems with it are pretty much Game Of Thrones‘ fault. And, sure, that might be a tad reductive, but it is true that HBO’s fantasy hit seems to have recalibrated viewers’ brains, long-term, in terms of what they could expect genre TV to look like. It’s certainly generated lots of knock-on effects as producers throughout the industry have spent huge amounts of both time and money over the last decade to try to make their finales or final battles match that long-passed series on both spectacle and scale.
Which is why it’s interesting to hear The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke make some efforts to set expectations ahead of his series’ final season, which debuts on Prime Video on April 8. Kripke was talking to SFX Magazine (via Deadline) about that final season, which sees the titular group struggling to mount a resistance in the face of a world that’s fallen ever more strongly under the villainous Homelander’s superpowered sway. Which is convenient, in so far as skulking through the shadows is almost certainly a lot cheaper than trying to throw a bunch of superpowered people at each other in big, open battles: “We talked a lot about the French Resistance and prison camp breaks,” Kripke said of the show’s final outing. “We were really working our way through that kind of season. I mean, there are not full battle scenes because we still don’t have Game Of Thrones‘ budget.”
It’s not like The Boys is shying away from conflict, of course; just that it’s trying to do so without necessarily breaking the bank. “There are a lot of very direct confrontations,” the former Supernatural head assured audiences. “A lot of the people that you want to see smashing into each other smash into each other. I hope it’s cathartic and emotionally satisfying, but I’m a tiny bit terrified.”
It’s undeniable that TV has only gotten more expensive in recent years, even as budgets have begun to contract. It feels worth noting, for instance, that Sony—which produces The Boys for Amazon—announced this week that it was closing Pixomondo, the visual effects studio that it acquired a few years back at least partly on the strength of the work it did on Game Of Thrones; the effects company, which also created sequences for The Boys, is being phased out in favor of the company’s Canadian-set Sony Pictures Imageworks, at least in part because Canadian tax incentives for production work can help to defray mounting costs.
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