The Boys budget is enormous compared to Invincible

Prime Video has two superhero bangers on its platform: Invincible and The Boys – but the latter demands the most money by a wide margin, according to a new report.

Avengers: Endgame brought pop culture to its knees and MCU hype to an all-time high, but as the world cooled off from the hysteria, it needed a tonic. That’s where The Boys came in, with its blood-soaked, crude thrills connecting with audiences immediately.

While other streaming platforms and shows have tried to tap into the same market (superhero content aimed primarily at older audiences) with niche properties, such as Jupiter’s Legacy and Melstrom, none of them have replicated The Boys’ success.

Well, that’s excluding Invincible, which was renewed for a second and third season before its first finale even aired. The wait for Season 2 has been agonizing, due in part to the pandemic and intensive animation work, but its budget is nothing compared to The Boys.

Invincible budget is 20 times smaller than The Boys

The Boys has a budget more than 20 times bigger than Invincible, according to a new report from Deadline.

In Season 1, episodes of The Boys were said to cost around $11.2 million each. Given the escalation of set pieces and special effects (let’s not forget the 11-foot-high, 30-foot-long prosthetic penis for Termite’s scene), Seasons 2 and 3 almost definitely had larger budgets.

Let’s say, for the sake of easiness, we’re now at around $15 million per episode on Season 4. Divided by 20, that means Invincible is costing $750,000 an episode, give or take a few hundred thousand.

This comes from Invincible’s executive producer Marge Dean, who said the series had “barely” any marketing but managed to find an audience via impressive word-of-mouth recommendations.

“I love Amazon, they’re great, but there was barely any marketing for this show. This thing just popped up but I had no idea what it was or what was going to happen,” she said, noting that a “significant number of people who don’t normally watch this stuff found the show and took a chance.”

Dean also advocated further for adult animation to continue flexing outside the “kids and comedy box that it has been stuck in for decades… at the heart of adult animation are themes, issues, and ideas that build into a story in a way that people can actually hear. The key is that balance between action and deep emotional human experience.”

Invincible Season 2 is due to hit Prime Video on November 3, 2023. Find out more here, and check out everything we know about The Boys Season 4 here.