The Boy Season 4 Can Revive 1 Superhero Movie’s Best Wasted Idea

Warning: Contains SPOILERS for The Boys season 3

Now that The Boys season 3 finale has hinted at Homelander's son Ryan becoming a villain, the satirical superhero series can fulfill the empty promises of 2019’s disappointing letdown Brightburn. Ever since the series debuted in 2019, The Boys has been a particularly insightful, unapologetic, and mature satire of superhero tropes. Where many parodies of comic books are content to poke good-natured fun at the cliches of superhero media, The Boys has used a sharper satirical approach to comment on everything from xenophobia to police brutality.

The Boys season 3 was no exception, with its major villain Soldier Boy's addiction to Bennies being a brutal condemnation of the Reagan era’s hypocritical “war on drugs” and the devastating effects these policies had on poor minority communities. The ending of The Boys season 3 set up an even darker twist on the show’s political commentary, as Homelander’s young son Ryan was introduced to his father’s ultra-nationalist right-wing cult of followers. This chilling setup proves that The Boys season 4 can now offer a more pointed, prophetic take on a premise established before by 2019’s Brightburn.

Released in 2019, Brightburn was the story of Brandon, a mysterious baby who appeared to Midwest parents when the couple struggled to conceive. However, it soon became clear that Brandon was actually an evil spin on Superman. Like Joe Hill’s famous short story “The Cape,” Brightburn’s subversion of the beloved Man of Steel didn’t directly reference Superman by name but instead relied on audience members having sufficient familiarity with superhero tropes for them to realize that they were witnessing the birth of a new hero—or rather, villain. However, Brightburn failed to make much use of this ingenious premise. Fortunately, Ryan being seduced into murderous far-right fascism by his famous father in The Boys season 4 means the show can now make up for the empty promises of Brightburn.

How The Boys Season 4 Shares Brightburn’s Genius Premise

The boys homelander better father than butcher ryan

Both Brightburn and The Boys introduce a young superhero who is not yet in complete control of his powers and starts as a relatively normal, innocent kid. In both cases, the characters are tempted by power as their superpowers become apparent and eventually become full-blown villains by the end of their respective stories. However, much like The Boys season 3 (partially) redeemed A-Train by having the character kill off Blue Hawk (only for him to discover that violence alone couldn’t make up for his earlier misdeeds), the show’s Ryan storyline has been similarly morally complex in a way that Brightburn avoided entirely. In Brightburn, Brandon was always unquestionably doomed to become evil and the character has little in the way of psychological complexity, with Brightburn’s tension coming from how long it takes his parents to cotton on rather than whether or not the character is evil. In contrast, Ryan is still an innocent, fundamentally good kid on The Boys, making his possible downfall much more affecting.

Where Brightburn Went Wrong

Between blaming the lead character’s evil on the psychic influence of his spaceship (thus sapping Brightburn of any intriguing “nature vs nurture” story) and never exploring the “evil Superman” premise beyond a few neat kills, Brightburn squandered the ideas that the movie could have explored. In contrast, The Boys season 3’s Hughie story provides an original, unusual spin on the old canard that great power necessitates great responsibility. The antihero of The Boys repeatedly abused Compound V but wasn’t aware of its side effects until the finale was using it to level the playing field against evil supes. His situation was complicated, whereas Brightburn’s plot never addressed how superhero stories can be power trip fantasies as Brandon was compelled (almost possessed) to do evil by his spaceship. This limited his personal responsibility, making the story’s morality bland and simple. Now, The Boys season 4 is perfectly primed to offer a more morally knotty, complex take on this storyline.

How The Boys Season 4 Can Retell Brightburn Right

Now that Starlight joined The Boys and left the Seven and Homelander killed Black Noir, the villain has no one to rein in their worst impulses. With Homelander and his zealous squad of far-right followers now going as far as murdering a protestor in broad daylight, Ryan is set up to become a superhero who mainly sees his powers as a way to gain power and influence. His father’s violent white supremacy means he views his powers as a tool to use for justice and moral uplift, but in the twisted way that only a fascist could. As a result, Ryan’s plot can explicitly address the ideology of supremacy that makes the concept of a killer superhero so scary after Brightburn did all it could to avoid the tricky question of why and how people become radicalized enough to kill for their ends.

Bucher and Homelander Make Ryan’s Story More Complicated

The Boys Star Celebrates Father's Day With Perfect Homelander Post

As Butcher’s tragic backstory on The Boys season 3 proved, the show’s characters are not without nuance in the way that Brightburn’s central cast proved flat and one-note. Ryan’s comparatively heroic adopted father Butcher has spent the three seasons of The Boys beating, killing, and torturing characters in the name of justice, meaning it would be believably tricky for Ryan to view the publicly adored Homelander as a villain and his biological father as a hero. However, Homelander’s sociopathic zeal for violence and his unabashed Nazi sympathies make him a much worse evil than the relatively humane Butcher, something that Ryan would have trouble deciphering for himself after an isolated childhood lacking in father figures. Thus, the satire of The Boys season 4 is uniquely well-suited to the subject of how potential superheroes become villains since the series has been exploring this theme for some time now.

In contrast, Brightburn was too bleak, hopeless, and morally simplistic in its story of an unambiguously evil villain wreaking havoc in his small hometown. Brightburn failed to find the humanity in its evil Superman, while The Boys has proven incredibly adept at humanizing even the monstrous Homelander over the years. Thus, The Boys season 4 can make Ryan’s decision to follow in either Homelander or Butcher’s footsteps far more emotionally involving than Brightburn’s comparatively pointless tale of an alien fulfilling his inevitable destiny without much in the way of growth or complexity.

More: Why Hughie Didn’t Use His Powers In The Boys Season 3 Finale

Episodes of The Boys are available on Amazon Prime