The Boys has become one of Prime Video’s signature TV series; it’s garnered thousands of views, and already spawned two different spinoff shows. But all of that would never have happened if the creators’ original plans for the franchise hadn’t fallen through.

Once upon a time, The Boys almost became a trilogy of big-screen movies. The franchise is based on an independent comic by writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson, which was published from 2006 to 2012.

Only a few months into the book’s run, a Boys adaptation started to draw interest from Hollywood. A new piece in Rolling Stone reveals that after executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg read The Boys debut issue they first helped bring the material to Sony.

From there, the project was developed at Sony for a full decade before it wound up as The Boys television series (developed by Eric Kripke). In fact, the article claims, “for a while, director Adam McKay was trying to turn The Boys into a trilogy of movies — the first one went as far as a finished screenplay and even demo animatics of scenes — but he wasn’t able to get it greenlighted in a pre-MCU Hollywood.”

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It’s sort of wild to imagine The Boys in a world before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but that is how long ago the original comic debuted. And maybe that’s why it took so long for the show to come together; it really made a lot more sense as a response to and a satire of the world of comic book and comic book movies after they moved even further into the mainstream thanks to the MCU and the similar proliferation of DC Comics adaptations in the last few years.

The Boys was recently renewed for a fifth season on Prime Video, which will also be its final batch of episodes.