The Boys always takes potshots at Marvel and DC, but season 4, episode 5, “Beware the Jabberwock, My Son,” takes particularly harsh satirical aim at the comic book giants. While Hughie is trying to control his now-superpowered father and Butcher is dealing with flying bloodthirsty sheep, the supes in The Seven all attend Vought’s V52 Expo, The Boys universe’s version of Disney’s D23 event. The purpose of this expo, both the real Disney one and the fictional Vought one, is to reveal the slate of upcoming projects to get fans excited about where their favorite superheroes are going next.

A-Train’s uplifting new movie with Will Ferrell, Training A-Train, is almost ready to be released. It’s been a whole year since the last Tek Knight movie, so it’s about time for a reboot. Firecracker is launching a series of religious-themed superhero movies under the new studio label “Vought Faith.” There’s a lot of bold new developments in the VCU that The Boys brilliantly uses to poke fun at the MCU (and, to a lesser extent, DC’s own big-screen output). The Boys’ latest episode is full of great meta gags, like revealing a dozen phases of content in one go.

8

Tek Knight’s Annual Reboot

Robert Vernon, known as Tek Knight

When Tek Knight goes out on stage at the Vought expo to announce his new movie, he tells his adoring fans, “It’s been a whole year since my last movie, so I’d say we’re due for a reboot!” This is a hilarious reference to DC’s penchant for continually rebooting Batman. The Robert Pattinson-starring reboot, The Batman, arrived in theaters less than a year after Ben Affleck’s Bat-swansong, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, arrived on HBO Max. Tek Knight’s in-universe reboot is actually arriving later than Warner Bros.’ last Batman reboot.

Warners brought in Affleck to play Batman just a couple of years after Christian Bale’s trilogy ended. Both Affleck and Michael Keaton were brought back to play Batman in The Flash just a year after The Batman. James Gunn’s DCU has an upcoming Batman reboot, The Brave and the Bold, that will run concurrently with Pattinson’s The Batman series. The studio won’t stop bombarding audiences with cinematic Batmen. Tek Knight’s annual reboot in The Boys universe is a great nod to these constant Batman reboots.

7

The Curse Of Fu Manchu

Fu Manchu was a supervillain created by Sax Rohmer

At the beginning of the Vought V52 Expo, there’s a graphic that goes through the company’s entire history. Before getting to more recent movies like Rising Tide and Dawn of the Seven, it goes back to the mid-20th century to explore Vought’s earliest movies. There’s a poster for a Crimson Countess movie that looks like a ‘70s Charles Bronson vigilante thriller. According to this graphic, Vought’s first ever superhero movie came out in 1950 and it was called Bombsight in The Curse of Fu Manchu.

Fu Manchu was a supervillain created by English author Sax Rohmer; he’s the originator of the evil criminal mastermind archetype and the basis of many villain tropes. However, in recent years, the character of Fu Manchu has come under fire for creating a racist stereotype. Marvel Comics based Shang-Chi’s father on Fu Manchu (and even took his name), but the character was renamed Wenwu for the movie adaptation. The inclusion of the racist Fu Manchu character in Vought’s history is a nod to the racism that Marvel has hidden from its own history.

6

A-Train’s New Vought+ Thriller Has Finished “Reshooting The Reshoots”

A-Train is a speedster

After showing off the trailer for Training A-Train, the uplifting, formulaic sports movie in which he co-stars with Will Ferrell as his running coach, A-Train unveils his next project: a Vought+ original thriller series called Double Standard. A-Train says that Double Standard has finished “reshooting the reshoots,” so it’s almost ready for release. This is a hysterical reference to Marvel Studios’ notorious track record of undergoing endless reshoots on its projects. Rather than just getting the script right before shooting, Marvel races its projects into production and figures out the story through a tedious, time-consuming reshoot process.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania underwent so many reshoots that the finished film is barely coherent. A-Train’s “reshooting the reshoots” comment is likely a direct reference to the troubled production of Marvel’s upcoming Captain America: Brave New World, which has gone through so many reshoots that there can’t possibly be any of the original script still in the movie. As the creative team behind The Boys knows, winging it on the first go-around and then getting stuck in an endless cycle of reshoots isn’t the best way to tell a story.

5

An Abundance Of Product Placement

Great brands are shown on the screen

Marvel movies are infamous for their product placement; just about every MCU film shows off a fancy new gadget in a fancy new Audi car. At Vought’s V52 Expo in The Boys season 4, episode 5, The Deep announces an all-new innovation in product placement technology that he calls “custom digital product placement.” This new program will digitally change which branded products are featured on-screen based on which viewers are watching. If an audience member is teetotal, then the scene will feature a soda brand instead of a beer brand.

This is a spot-on satire of the way corporations invade their customers’ privacy and mine their data in an attempt to keep selling more and more products to them. It probably won’t be too long before Disney+ actually alters the product placement in its Marvel properties to tailor the ads to their subscribers (based on the personal data of those subscribers). The Boys might give them some dangerous ideas.

4

A-Train Equates A TV Show’s Cost With Its Quality

A-Train’s new show cost a lot of money

When A-Train is talking about his new Vought+ original Double Standard, he tells his fans that the many reshoots have made it “the most expensive TV show ever made.” He then hilariously adds, “So, it’s gotta be good, right?” This ridiculous mindset, assuming that throwing more and more millions of dollars at a project will somehow make it better, satirizes not only Marvel and DC’s thinking, but the thinking of the entire Hollywood studio system. Every studio in Hollywood thinks that the more money they pump into a movie or TV show, the better it’ll be.

A-Train’s estimation that the most expensive TV show ever made has to be good is refuted by Marvel’s own history of lackluster television. Marvel’s Secret Invasion ranks among the most expensive TV shows ever made and it ended up being panned as quite possibly the worst thing the MCU has ever produced. Just because A-Train’s new show cost a lot of money, it doesn’t mean it’ll be any good.

3

The Deep Brags About His MTV Movie Award Wins

Marvel movies couldn’t win in Oscar categories

When The Deep introduces Vought’s new digital product placement program, he uses a clip from his MTV Movie Award-winning movie Rising Tide as an example of how it’ll work. He mentions the film’s MTV Movie Award wins with the same tone in his voice as if he’d won a boatload of Oscars. This is a hilarious reference to the superhero genre’s complete dismissal in Hollywood awards circles. Even in a world where superheroes are real, the Academy still won’t give them the time of day.

Marvel hasn’t been completely unsuccessful at the Academy Awards – Black Panther was nominated for Best Picture, and deservingly so – but its films find a lot more success at the MTV Movie Awards than the Oscars. Marvel movies couldn’t win in Oscar categories like Best Actor, Best Director, or Best Adapted Screenplay. But they often sweep the MTV Movie Awards in categories like Best Summer Movie So Far, Best Cameo, Best Shirtless Performance, and Best Kick-Ass Cast.

2

The Tek Knight’s 12-Minute Scene Of Total Darkness

A couple of fun nods to The Batman

The annual reboot gag isn’t the only great joke about Warner Bros.’ approach to the Batman franchise in The Boys’ Tek Knight scene. The details that Tek Knight reveals about his new movie include a couple of fun nods to The Batman. For starters, Tek Knight says his new movie will have a soundtrack full of Nirvana hits, which is a reference to The Batman’s recurring use of the Nirvana song “Something in the Way.” The song works really well in the movie, but it does make this version of Bruce Wayne come off like an edgelord emo.

Tek Knight also mentions that his new movie has a 12-minute sequence that plays out in pitch blackness, which is a hilarious reference to Batman films getting darker and darker (both figuratively and literally). The Batman has a fight scene in a dark hallway lit only by the muzzle flashes of Carmine Falcone’s gun-toting goons. It looks really cool, especially through the lens of Oscar-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser, but it’s hard to tell what’s going on.

1

The Phases 7-19 Timeline Mocks The MCU’s Overplanning For The Future

A brilliantly self-aware nod to the MCU’s overplanning

The best joke about the MCU in The Boys season 4, episode 5 is when The Deep and his co-host unveil the content line-up for Phases 7 through 19 of the Vought Cinematic Universe. Like the first few phases of the MCU, this VCU line-up includes a Seven movie in every phase (except Phase 10 when the younger heroes take over). There’s a movie called Homelander: Justice Served (possibly a whitewashed dramatization of his recent legal troubles), one called A-Train: Into the Multiverse (suggesting even Vought isn’t immune to this multiverse craze), and one called Firecracker’s A Christmas Wish.

This is a brilliantly self-aware nod to the MCU’s overplanning for the future and Kevin Feige’s signature multi-phase announcements. What makes The Boys’ corporate satire even deeper here is that Feige’s last announcement of such an ambitious, decade-long slate – his announcement of the “Multiverse Saga,” consisting of Phases 4 through 6 – was reportedly done at the behest of Disney, not Marvel itself. These corporate expos are more about pleasing the shareholders than the fans.