Prime Video confirmed today that Gen V, the Boys spinoff set at Godolkin University School of Crimefighting, will not return for a third season. The show wrapped its second season in October 2025 and has sat without a renewal for six months. The answer is now officially no.
Eric Kripke and Evan Goldberg issued a statement: “While we wish we could keep the party going another season at Godolkin, we’re committed to continuing the Gen V characters’ stories in The Boys Season 5 and other VCU projects on the horizon. You’ll see them again.”
That’s quite a corporate sendoff for a show that spent two seasons mistaking political provocation for entertainment.
Gen V launched in 2023 as a YA-adjacent spinoff following students at a superhero university, all powered by the Compound V drug administered to them in childhood. The premise had real potential — a collegiate version of the Boys universe, focused on a generation of ideologically captured young people being trained as weapons by a corrupt corporate institution. On paper, that is a rich satirical canvas.
The show that arrived was something different. Season 1 earned a midseason renewal on the strength of its Boys brand affiliation and a genuinely strong opening Nielsen performance. Season 2 premiered in September 2025 with its first three episodes pulling 424 million minutes viewed in week one, enough to reach eighth on the Nielsen streaming originals chart — the show’s largest weekly total ever, with two-thirds of that audience coming from adults 18-49. Those numbers looked like momentum. Amazon pulled the renewal anyway.
The content of Season 2 is the reason. Fandom Pulse covered the show extensively during its run. The season included a scene in which a character practices levitating living beings by working on a goat — a goat the dean names “Elon Musk,” explaining that naming animals after people you dislike makes it easier to accidentally kill them. The goat then explodes into bloody pieces on screen. This aired on a show that its own showrunner described as a political platform. It was not subtle about what it was doing.
The parent show, The Boys, has always framed Homelander as a Trump analogue — Kripke has said so repeatedly and on the record. For Season 5, which is currently airing, he told Deadline: “There’s been a total of zero notes about pulling our punches or about making things less political or less savage.” He added that things he once thought were too far-fetched for the show “have come to pass in a way that’s really really f***ing troubling.” He was not talking about superhero fiction.
Kripke is a talented showrunner who has spent the last several years making his political contempt for half the country a core part of his promotional strategy. The Boys gets away with it because Antony Starr is magnetic enough to make Homelander watchable regardless of the subtext, and because the show’s nihilism is at least executed with craft. Gen V had neither the craft nor the cast to carry the same weight. The Elon Musk goat scene is not sharp satire. It is a show’s writers telling you what they actually want to happen to a real living person and dressing it up as comedy.
The show also suffered a tragedy when Chance Perdomo, who played Andre Anderson and was positioned as one of Gen V‘s central figures, died in a motorcycle accident in March 2024 on his way to set. Showrunner Michele Fazekas had already written five episodes of Season 2 built around his character before his death. The production was delayed, the scripts were rebuilt, and the season that aired was produced under those circumstances. That is a real loss and Perdomo’s death deserves acknowledgment separate from any criticism of the show’s creative direction.
But the weakness that killed Gen V ran deeper than one actor’s absence. Asa Germann, who played Sam Riordan, has already booked a series regular role on Paramount+’s Frisco King — the clearest public signal that no one expected a renewal. The show’s principal cast simply did not generate the kind of individual breakout performances that can sustain a franchise spinoff. Without the Perdomo-centered storylines that Season 2 lost, what remained was a show that substituted political messaging for character work and assumed that association with The Boys brand would carry the rest. It didn’t.
The Boys itself ends May 20 with its series finale. Vought Rising, the prequel starring Jensen Ackles as Soldier Boy and Aya Cash as Stormfront set in the 1950s, wrapped production and is targeting a 2027 release. The Boys: Mexico remains in active development. None of these projects are positioned to pick up Gen V‘s characters in any meaningful way. Vought Rising is a period piece, and Mexico is its own thing.
Kripke’s promise that “you’ll see them again” means Marie and Jordan showing up in the final episodes of The Boys Season 5. It sounds like copes.
What do you think? Was there ever a version of Gen V that could have worked, or was it doomed from the start?
Three free books. No spam. Just new releases, deals, and the occasional update from the front lines of independent publishing. Sign up for the Jon Del Arroz newsletter and start reading today.
