‘The Boys’ Finale Takes a Historic IMDb Hit — But Kripke Has the Last Laugh
For nearly seven years, ‘The Boys‘ built something genuinely rare in the streaming landscape. The Prime Video series, across its five-season run, chronicled fan-favorites like Billy Butcher and Homelander and became one of the most talked-about shows in the world. Eric Kripke’s vision of a corrupt, corporatized superhero culture struck a chord with audiences in a way that few genre series manage, and the show’s devoted following was almost always reflected in its critical reception.
That devotion showed up most clearly on IMDb. Season one regularly hovered between 8.1 and 9.1, with its finale landing at an impressive 9.1. Season two escalated further and closed at 9.4. Season three’s beloved “Herogasm” pulled a near-perfect 9.6 and cemented itself as the show’s cultural peak. Even season four, despite its more divisive reception, still managed to close with a solid 9.1-rated finale.
Season five told a completely different story. The series finale, titled ‘Blood and Bone,’ has seen its IMDb score fall to a 5.6, placing it among the most poorly rated season finales in television history and representing a stunning reversal for a show that once treated anything below nine as a disappointment. While the episode resolved important storylines for Homelander, Billy Butcher, and The Deep, its reception among audiences was far from warm.
The sheer volume of the voting has fuelled a debate about whether review-bombing is distorting the picture. The finale attracted over 114k ratings on IMDb, a lot more than nearly any other episode in the show’s history, which makes it difficult to determine how much of the reaction reflects genuine dissatisfaction versus coordinated downvoting. Fan frustrations ran across multiple fronts, with many feeling the finale’s climactic confrontation felt small in scope, the political messaging too heavy-handed, and the overall ending more predictable than the series had trained its audience to expect.
Kripke found his footing by looking beyond the online noise. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, the showrunner described going on a genuine emotional journey with the online reaction before the actual viewership data grounded him, noting that the loudest voices represented only a fraction of the real audience. Season five reached 57 million viewers per episode globally and ranked among the top ten most-viewed seasons of any Prime Video original series, driving the streamer’s largest three-week ratings surge of any show or movie.
The finale also attracted one particularly vocal critic from well outside the fan community. Following the release of ‘Blood and Bone,’ Elon Musk took to X and called the finale “pathetic,” seemingly objecting to Homelander being stripped of his powers and left begging for his life. Kripke’s response, reported by Deadline, was to repost Musk’s message and declare it the greatest review he would ever receive, a moment that felt entirely in the spirit of a show built around making powerful people deeply uncomfortable.
Whatever the final verdict, the collision of record-breaking viewership and a historically low IMDb score is exactly the kind of polarizing chaos ‘The Boys’ always seemed engineered to generate. Do you think the finale earned Homelander’s humbling end and Butcher’s sacrifice, or did ‘Blood and Bone’ let the series down in a way those numbers honestly reflect?
