Why The Boys Series Finale Changed Butcher & Homelander’s Fates From The Comics

With The Boys now wrapped up, showrunner Eric Kripke explained a few key changes from the comics. While speaking with Collider, he broke down why the battle between Homelander and Butcher was tweaked:

There are some similarities in the Homelander-Butcher of it all, at least in terms of, we’re trying to nod to it, of the setting in the Oval Office, or using the crowbar as the final kill. But, and I’ve said this in interviews before, the comic ends with it turns out that Homelander isn’t the villain at all. He was tricked into being the villain. The real villain was Black Noir all along. People love it, and mileage varies, but that just was never satisfying to me to have followed Antony Starr for all these seasons, and then at the very end to find out that he actually didn’t do any of the things that he thought he did; it was actually Noir, who was his clone. So, I was never gonna do that version.

In terms of the conflict between Butcher and Hughie, he said to TheWrap:

“We knew that we did not want to have Butcher murder all of the Boys,” showrunner Eric Kripke told TheWrap. “Hughie being the only survivor felt wrong to us. It just shows how they’re different mediums, and when you have a TV show you make a pact to the viewers with these characters that you know you’re not just going to arbitrarily murder people they love, so we were never going to go there.”