Eric Kripke Drives 57 Million Viewers for The Boys Finale Review
The boys finale review now starts with a number: 57 million viewers per episode globally, which The Boys season 5 reached after five weeks of data. Prime Video says that makes the final season the series’ highest yet, even as online complaints kept building before Wednesday’s finale.
Eric Kripke and 57 million
Eric Kripke said the online reaction is not what is happening in the real world. He called it a fraction of very loud, opinionated people, and said the ratings calmed him once he saw them. That is the core split in this story: a loud digital argument versus a season drawing one of Prime Video’s biggest audiences.
The season also landed among the Top 10 most-viewed seasons of any Prime Video original series and drove the service’s largest three-week ratings surge of any show or movie. For a platform built on scale, those are not decorative numbers. They show that the final season is still pulling real viewing at a level that puts it in rare company inside the service’s own original lineup.
Game of Thrones Comparisons
Some viewers compared the final season to HBO’s Game of Thrones, while others said the show had been sluggishly paced with too much filler before the end. Kripke pushed back by saying the writers were trying to give the show’s more than a dozen major characters a meaningful story with a proper ending. He said, “I owe it to all of them — in that television is the character business — I owe it to all of them to flesh them out and humanize them and their stories.”
Kripke also said, “At no point during the writing of it was I like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re making filler episodes. So who cares?’” That quote gets to the tradeoff built into long-running franchise TV: character closure costs screen time, and screen time can trigger backlash before viewers see the payoff.
Wednesday Finale and Vought Rising
The series finale runs slightly more than an hour and airs on Wednesday, giving viewers a final answer on a season that has already posted its strongest audience mark. Kripke said the season also helped set up Vought Rising, which is scheduled to premiere next year, so the ratings story is not just about the end of The Boys but about the franchise’s handoff to its next chapter.
For viewers, that means the debate around pacing is secondary to the larger business result: the show is ending with enough reach to support what comes after. If the finale delivers on the character work Kripke says he prioritized, the season’s 57 million-viewer average will look less like a backlash story and more like a franchise that kept its audience while closing the book.
