Perhaps the best thing about Season 3 of The Boys was the delightfully rude arrival of Jensen Ackles as Soldier Boy, and not just because he was nude when it happened. The role was definitely different from what Supernatural fans were used to seeing from the actor, but nonetheless, Ackles really gave it his all. Just over a month after The Boys' season finale, the Amazon Studios series dropped some previously unseen content via an extended look at the faux Soldier Boy movie-within-the-series, featuring Ackles nailing it with some intentionally bad acting.
Throughout the third season of the superhero series, we gradually learned about Soldier Boy’s background during the war and how he ended up brainwashed and put on ice, so to speak. When it came time to track down his former sidekicks, the TNT Twins, fans got their first glimpses of the fake movie Red Thunder. Now, courtesy of Vought International's Twitter, the full scene that was filmed for The Boys has been released, and it’s both hilariously good and bad, as well as impossible to turn away from. Check it out!
We saw your tweets, opened your emails, and read your one-star reviews. That’s why we’re making the brave choice to bring Soldier Boy back to Vought++. Films like Red Thunder will now have this content warning to properly prepare patriots before they press play! pic.twitter.com/2r6AsKVpuPAugust 11, 2022
Since Soldier Boy was Vought’s first superhero during WWII, the company was obviously into trying out all the ways of keeping his name in the public eye, foreshadowing the blockbuster status of The Seven in later years. But this was clearly more reflective of an unpolished Hollywood, with Jensen Ackles' awkward performance not the only purposefully terrible element. Though it does show how great of an actor Ackles can be, since it's a talent all on its own to pull off believably mishandled acting.
Soldier Boy is a fan-favorite character from The Boys comics, so fans had somewhat of an idea of what he’d be like when introduced in the third season. However, when Jensen Ackles was announced as the one donning the supe’s costume, it only heightened the anticipation for the actor taking on arguably the most NSFW scenes of his career to date.
Meanwhile, now that Season 4 of the series is ramping up for production, as confirmed by star Jack Quaid, hopefully more fake content will come out as we wait for new episodes to arrive in 2023, with The Boys promoting its fake Vought++ streaming service. Who knows the types of movies that could land on there?
On top of a fourth season of The Boys, the franchise is expanding with new spinoff series, Gen V, which will follow a new and young generation of supes in a Hunger Games-esque show set at a college exclusively for young adult superheroes. The spinoff series already had a complicated development, with Gen V swapping out some original leads through recasting, but nothing can stop this supe franchise from taking off.
Although you can’t actually watch Red Thunder on Vought++, since it doesn’t exist, you can watch all three seasons of The Boys now on Amazon Prime with a subscription.
