How The Boys season 3's disgusting opening scene was inspired by Ant-Man

Showrunner Eric Kripke has been teasing for a while that the scene is "jaw-droppingly insane", and now that the episode has been released, it didn't disappoint. Speaking exclusively with RadioTimes.com, Kripke has revealed that the initial idea for the opening came from an Ant-Man internet meme which did the rounds following Avengers: Infinity War.

He explained: "Believe it or not, it evolved fairly organically. We usually do all the madness last. So, where it started, if you were to look at our writer's board… there was a long time that the space was 'TBD superhero sequence'. We just knew that Frenchie and Kimiko had to fight a superhero and we were [too] busy figuring out the rest of the story to figure out which one.

"Then we came back to it, finally, and it begins with, 'Okay, what are the big ones that we haven't done yet?' And someone pitched Ant-Man. At the time there was that meme going around of, 'Why didn't Ant-Man just crawl up Thanos' butt and explode him? It could have been a much shorter movie'. And so, we as writers said, 'wouldn't it be funny if we had this character crawl up a character's butt and blow them up and give them what Marvel couldn't give them?'"

However, Kripke noted that the show's shocking nature means sometimes the writers find themselves struggling to come up with new scenarios, as one of them pointed out that they had already blown someone up "from up their butt" in season one.

"It's a really remarkable show when you can pitch an ass explosion and someone says, 'but we did that'," Kripke continued. "And so we couldn't do an ass explosion and then there's only so many orifices a person has, so that's how we got to it."

Kripke also called shooting the sequence "one of the great pleasures of my life", explaining that "the penis is practical. So that is an 11 foot high, 20 foot long penis that is built at great expense. Like, Amazon spent a lot of money building that. And it's just yet another reason why I will never have a better job than this one."

Additional reporting by David Craig.

The first three episodes of The Boys season 3 are available on Amazon Prime Video now, with further episodes dropping weekly on Fridays. Check out more of our Sci-Fi and Fantasy coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight.

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