Avengers: Endgame is packed with more unashamed fan service than perhaps any other movie ever made, and for the most part, it works. However, one scene that not everyone was on board with was when all of the franchise’s female superheroes gathered together during the final battle against Thanos, with many finding it far too on the nose, clunky and outright cringe-worthy.
There were countless better ways to get the same point across, and in a recent interview, The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke admitted that he was one of the many fans that didn’t care for the Endgame‘s A-Force assembling, which directly informed a recurring joke throughout the second season of Amazon’s smash hit superhero show.
“As for ‘Girls Get It Done’, a lot of that came from our executive producer, Rebecca Sonneshine, who came in after the weekend Endgame opened. She was just furious. I saw it, too, and I was like, ‘That was the dumbest, most contrived…’. And she’s like, ‘Don’t get me started’. She found it condescending and I agreed. So that just created for us a target, a satirical target. When there’s something really ridiculous in either superhero or celebrity or Hollywood culture, we’ll immediately go after it. It’s an easy shot.”
Season 2 of The Boys saw the marketing department at Vought International try and push the female members of The Seven to the forefront, whether it be merchandising Maeve’s recently revealed bisexuality or reiterating the ‘Girls Get It Done’ tagline over and over again, both of which were designed as merciless parodies of Hollywood’s desire to try and appeal to every demographic regardless of how involved they are, or even how much they care about the causes themselves.
Finding out that Kripke scripted the entire subplot just to poke fun at Avengers: Endgame‘s heavy-handed treatment of supposed female empowerment shouldn’t come as a surprise, either, especially when one of the major appeals of The Boys is how it takes the established tropes and archetypes of the comic book genre and turns them on their head. Joss Whedon didn’t get off lightly, so it only seems fair that a shot was fired in the direction of Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios for good measure, too.