Amazon Studios has gone boy crazy! Er, Boys crazy! First the streaming giant confirmed a live-action spin-off show set at “America’s only college for superheroes.” Then today it announced that an animated, eight-part anthology series titled Diabolical is on the way from The Boys’ executive producers and writers, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.
Diabolical isn’t a new series, but rather a collection of short films set in the superhero universe of The Boys, which I will now be calling the Boys-iverse. “Ever since we saw the animated film The Animatrix, a series of short animated films set in the universe of The Matrix, we’ve wanted to rip it off. Today that dream has come true,” said Rogen and Goldberg, referring to the 2003 collection made by a bevy of top anime studios. (It’s also exactly like the recent Star Wars: Visions anthology.) Diabolical is animated by Titmouse Studios, the studio behind Star Trek: Lower Decks, the new Animaniacs series, and The Venture Bros.
While the actual content of Diabolical hasn’t been announced — one might assume it has something to do with supervillains, although in the Boys-iverse the superheroes themselves are already basically supervillains — the names of the people making the shorts have been released, and it’s an impressive list: Shang-Chi’s Awkwafina, The Boys creator Garth Ennis, New Girl’s Eliot Glazer and Broad City’s Ilana Glazer, Invincible’s Simon Racioppa, Rick & Morty’s Justin Roiland, Brooklyn 99‘s Andy Samberg, Archer’s Aisha Tyler, and of course Rogen and Goldberg.
“Surprise! We’re almost finished with eight episodes of our animated series, Diabolical. We gathered together some incredible creators and we gave them one rule… just kidding, there’s no rules. They blew the doors off it, delivering eight completely unexpected, funny, shocking, gory, moist, emotional episodes. You think The Boys is nuts? Wait till you see this,” said Diabolical executive producer Eric Kripke, who’s also the showrunner of The Boys.
Diabolical will premiere on Prime Video at some point in 2022, as will The Boys’ other spin-off. But since the animated episodes are nearly finished and it has a real title, I suspect Diabolical will be premiering first.