Seth Rogen Reveals How He Convinced Sony To Make The Boys

During an appearance on the web series “Hot Ones,” Seth Rogen briefly chronicled how “The Boys” went from a good idea for a movie to a hit series. Rogen told host Sean Evans he and his producing partner Evan Goldberg are fans of Garth Ennis, who also wrote “Preacher,” which the duo developed into a series for AMC. They bought the first issue of “The Boys” when it came out and immediately thought the concept of “regular people fighting superheroes” was a great concept for a movie. They took the idea to Sony and executive producer Neal Moritz, who agreed to buy the rights to make a movie, but didn’t hire Rogen and Goldberg to write or produce the project.

According to Rogen, the people Sony did hire over the course of a decade managed to screw it up until it “came back to us to us basically, and we turned it into the TV show.” On the subject of the superhero genre, Rogen praised Marvel for making great films and TV shows but pointed out that they can’t cross certain boundaries. Rogan said it would “simply be too damaging to their brand to have like a character kill someone with a 10-foot d***, so as long as they’re not doing that, it leaves a great opportunity for us to do that.”