The Boys Season 3 Scene Was Inspired By Ant-Man In Thanos' Butt Meme

The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke talks through how the Ant-Man/Thanos meme inspired the explosive and instantly-unforgettable season 3 premiere scene.

Warning: spoilers ahead for The Boys season 3

The Boys season 3 is off to a wild start with a scene that drew morbid inspiration from the meme of Ant-Man defeating Thanos through an unconventional solution: his butt. The 'Thanus' theory began circulating the internet in 2019 ahead of the Avengers: Endgame premiere when fans posited that Ant-Man could defeat the Mad Titan by shrinking down, crawling up his sphincter, and suddenly enlarging, destroying Thanos from the inside. The theory did what all insane things on the internet do and inspired a plethora of Thanus memes and even a catchy theme song.

Now, within the first 15 minutes of the season 3 premiere of Amazon's twisted superhero show, that idea has been taken to new heights (or lows). In the scene, a superhero (or 'Supe' in the parlance of the show) named Termite shrinks down and enters the urethra of his significant other in order to pleasure him from the inside. Termite accidentally sneezes, and he instantly expands, exploding through his lover's pelvis and instantly killing him, leaving the Supe bloody and shellshocked.

While savvy viewers might have pegged the Thanus meme as the inspiration for the Termite scene, it's now been confirmed by The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke in an interview with Variety. He details how one writer in particular spearheaded the idea in an effort to up the ante on the meme and give superhero fans something that Marvel would never in a million years sign off on. He also delights in what, exactly, he got his bosses to put money into making a reality. Kripke's full account is below:

Craig Rosenberg wrote the script and deserves most of the blame for it. These evolve in a writers’ room and the evolution of that sequence started with, ‘We need The Boys to fight a superhero.’ So then we ask, ‘What big superhero haven’t we done yet?’ Someone says, ‘We haven’t done Ant-Man.’ And then someone else says, ‘There’s that meme of Ant-Man climbing up Thanos’ butt and blowing him up. So we should do that. We should give the audience the thing that Marvel can’t give to them.’ Then someone else raises their hand, hilariously, and says, ‘Didn’t we already do an ass explosion?’ Which we did, in Season 1, with Translucent, which is hilarious.

And so, once you take butts off the table, there’s really only so many orifices you can go in. And it was Craig who mounted that argument. He’s like, ‘Look, the mouth isn’t funny and the butt has been done.’ So we’re going to blaze some new trail through the eye of the needle, as it were. And it was so funny.

Even though it was very much sweetened by the effects, that is a practical penis. That is an 11-foot high, 20-foot long penis head that has a urethra, a tunnel in it, and built at great expense. We got Sony and Amazon to pay so much money to build this set. And it’s just another reason why I love my job.

While filming inside a giant, practically-made penis that then explodes is a surefire way to start a season of television off on a hard-to-top note of insanity, Kripke promises that the scene is just the tip of the iceberg for season 3. Reportedly a superhero orgy dubbed Herogasm is yet to come in the form of an annual orgy between the Vought corporate-sponsored heroes that will not only provide plenty of wild moments but some emotionally charged ones as well. Kripke and his writers are no strangers to pushing the envelope, and the show has reveled in sexual debauchery in the past. Popclaw popped her landlord's head when she sat on his face in season 1, and season 2 gave viewers a sex scene with The Deep involving gill fingering and a Supe named Love Sausage who has a prehensile penis, to name only a few.

The question remains whether the show will be able to continue to shock viewers. While being shocked can be great fun, the show's best shocks serve as a window into a character's psyche or help subvert superhero tropes. Some do both, like when, after killing a plane's hijackers, Homelander still let the aircraft go down. At this rate the show could run out of ways to shock people without making them numb. Provocation without a deeper meaning makes for cheap thrills and is like eating empty calories. But so long as The Boys doesn't forget the damaged and hurt hearts beating at the core of their antiheroes like Huey and Kimiko, the shocks like Termite's Thanus-inspired mishap will continue to land.

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Source: Variety