Well, somebody had to do it. If you’ve been following the recent updates from Warner Bros., HBO Max, and Discovery+ throughout this week, you know that’s hard to have a reaction other than “WTF is going on?” at the decisions that have been announced and/or leaked with the platforms’ content and their future plans. Between titles mysteriously disappearing from the catalog, anticipated movies getting shelved and filmmakers getting blindsided, Prime Video’s The Boys took to Twitter to poke fun at the mess that’s going on with HBO Discovery through a clever Vought announcement.
The fake announcement pokes fun at the rebranding of HBO Max, which is set to incorporate Discovery+ and dial down the production of original content in order to focus on theatrical productions. But what is it going to be called? This is a platform that was already rebranded twice, being called HBO Go and HBO Now before Max came along to serve as a global title. As they’re running out of names, The Boys is poking fun at HBO by announcing Vought++, a streaming platform that encompasses several other streaming services for plus-plus fun (at a higher price) at the comfort of your home.
And that’s not all: The post has several Easter egg-like jokes that, the more you read, the harder you’ll laugh, including a cheap shot taken at short-lived streaming platform CNN+ (which was shut down by HBO Discovery barely weeks after it launched), a construction reality series that is obviously a parody of Property Brothers, and, of course, a ton of references to the flagship super-hero content that is frequently used to attract new subscribers.
The joke works perfectly since The Boys’ biggest characters are very clearly satires of DC’s most iconic superheroes. In the main cast alone, Homelander (Anthony Starr), Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott), A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), and The Deep (Chace Crawford) are easy to associate with Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, and Aquaman. These are all heroes (and huge money-makers) that are caught in the crossfire of whatever’s going on with HBO Discovery and Warner Bros., since the biggest course correction announced by new CEO David Zaslav is to scrap the Snyderverse – AKA forgetting that movies like Batman v. Superman: The Dawn of Justice and Man of Steel exist and starting over with a Marvel Cinematic Universe-like 10-year plan that allegedly will bring the bucks back in the global box office.
An additional layer of the joke is the fact that, in The Boys’ universe, Vought is a mega-company that does whatever is necessary to keep profits coming, and this includes making unpopular decisions, shunning important players for ridiculous reasons, and just flat-out making changes on a whim without really caring about what the public’s opinion is going to be. Not that HBO Max Discovery++ Now is doing that, no… that’s just Vought for you.
You can stream all three seasons of The Boys on Prime Video.
Check out the clever Vought++ announcement tweet below:
