Despite negative review bombs, The Boys is more popular than ever

Amazon's gross-out superhero show The Boys returned last week for its fourth season, and immediately something strange happened. The show has always been talked about widely online, but the chatter started to turn, with conservative fans review-bombing the new season, complaining of wokeness and bad writing. On Rotten Tomatoes, the fourth season has a 50% fresh rating, down significantly from a 75% fresh rating for season 3.

What accounts for the drop? A popular explanation online is that the conservative fans currently blasting the series have only just now noticed that the show is progressive politically; The Boys has been anti-authoritarian since the beginning, with the villainous, sociopathic superhero Homelander often paralleled with Donald Trump. Why some fans are only taking offense to this now, I'm not sure.

Actually, it may have something to do with the show's audience growing by leaps and bounds; as the number of people who watch The Boys grows, so does the number of people who can get triggered by it and complain online. According to Amazon, the first three episodes of season 4 — which were dropped all at once last Thursday, June 13 — drew 21% more viewers in their first four days of availability than the first three episodes of season 3 (which also dropped all at once back in 2022) did in that same time frame.

For those four days, The Boys was the No. 1 title on Prime Video in 160 countries, with 60% of viewers located outside the U.S. We don't know the exact numbers, but clearly this is good news for the show. So far as season premieres for returning shows go, the only thing on Amazon that beats The Boys is the season 2 premiere of Reacher.

You can tell The Boys is popular because of the attention it's getting online. Just the other day, Hideo Kojima — the creator of the Metal Gear Solid video games and all-around pop culture obsessive — tweeted about enjoying the show to tens of thousands of likes. Once you get the famouses talking about your series, you know it's going places.

I'm not surprised by The Boys' success. The show started off as a parody of the then-oversaturated superhero genre, but quickly established its own identity: The Boys is violent, outrageous, satirical, and openly political. It's well-written and digestible, with compelling performances from the likes of Antony Starr as Homelander and Karl Urban as Billy Butcher, the (former) leader of a team charged with taking down corrupt superheroes, of which there are many. The Boys is fortunate in that it's central metaphor — superheroes as stand-ins for the careless elites in our society — is more pertinent than ever; The Boys has always felt like a show for right now. But it's also just solidly entertaining, and it's reaping the benefits of that consistency.

This fourth season of The Boys will be the second-to-last; a fifth and final season will come out down the line, hopefully we won't have to endure another two-year gap, but I wouldn't be surprised. Amazon also has spinoffs in the works; the first season of Gen V has already aired, and The Boys: Mexico is on the way. As for the mothership show, new episodes drop on Thursdays.

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h/t Variety