COLUMN | Isn't It a Little Weird That Amazon is the Villain In The Boys and Fallout? | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

It is a little strange that the villainous corporations at the heart of popular Prime Video streaming shows like The Boys and Fallout are basically Amazon, right? This is just a weird thing for a gigantic corporation to do, surely? To build two gigantic and expensive series about how the streaming service’s corporate owner is basically evil incarnate?

The Boys might look like a classic superhero show. Indeed, many of the characters conform to recognizable superhero archetypes. The Deep (Chace Crawford) is essentially a single extended joke about how pathetic Aquaman (Jason Momoa) is. A-Train (Jesse T. Usher) is basically the Flash (Ezra Miller). Homelander (Antony Starr) is recognizably a classic Superman archetype, presenting as an all-American hero with the powers of flight, strength and laser eye beams.

Indeed, there is something darkly funny in the fact that, between The Boys and Invincible, Amazon has effectively produced two separate superhero television shows built around the twist that their Superman archetype is really a villain. There is a grim joke in there, particularly given Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos’ resemblance to a certain iconic bald billionaire supervillain. The Boys and Invincible are exactly the sorts of shows that Lex Luthor would commission for his streaming service.

Of course, The Boys is about more than just superheroes. Showrunner Eric Kripke has consistently argued that The Boys is “a dark comedy” about “late-stage capitalism.” As he explained in August 2021, “The crazy, gonzo moments are just what’s on the front of the cereal box. What we’re really interested in is late-stage capitalism and white supremacy cloaked in social media and systemic racism.” That idea finds expression through the show’s framing of Vought International.

Founded by a former Nazi, Vought International is a multinational corporation that has its tendrils in absolutely everything. In the context of the show, its most prominent product is superheroes, including Homelander. However, it also operates studios, streaming services, book publishers, clothing lines, food producers, energy companies and various defense subsidiaries. As Charles Pulliam-Moore pointed out during the show’s first season, “It’s Amazon.”

Sure, it might not literally be Amazon, but there is a strange sense of familiarity in watching Vought’s corporate machinations. Amazon also produces its own media, hosts its own fashion line, owns its own studio, has bought food distributors and has even signed defense contracts with the government. The company has invested heavily in Washington, increasing its lobbying spending by more than 460% between 2014 and 2019.

Amazon reported $143.3bn in revenue in the first quarter of 2024. It pays no federal corporate income tax. For point of contrast, twelve annual instalments of $8.1bn would be enough to end homelessness in the United States. Jeff Bezos earns over $23,000 every minute, meaning that he earns the average American annual salary every three minutes. The company has leveraged its massive power in the industry to completely quash any challenger or even seller under its heel.

Of course, Amazon isn’t in the superhero game, but there are echoes of that to be found at the edges of the company. In particular, Bezos is engaged in “biohacking” and is reportedly obsessed with transcending humanity in a more literal way, through expansion into space. Later episodes in fourth season even allude to the company’s infamous labor practices, with posters in an abandoned Vought International factory promising, “Unions Can’t. We Can.”

Interestingly, The Boys isn’t the only current Amazon streaming show that includes a corporate villain that evokes the parent company. Fallout takes place in a postapocalyptic wasteland, the result of the sinister machinations of the Vault-Tec Corporation. Like Vought, Vault-Tec is a very diverse company with many different interests. Its tendrils even reach into Hollywood, recruiting actor Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) as a spokesman for their line of exclusive doomsday shelters.

Once again, this is not subtle. Syrus Solo Jin noted that Vault-Tec is effectively “a private, unregulated capitalist body with every appalling feature of present-day American corporations rolled into one.” Noting the “irony, given that it’s on Amazon’s Prime Video”, Neil Armstrong noted that the show very aggressively satirized both Big Tech and late capitalism. Vault-Tec might not resemble Amazon quite as closely as Vought, if only because it has been less well developed, but it is certainly familiar.

On the surface, it would seem counter-intuitive that the fifth largest company in the world (by market cap) should invest so much in shows that are effectively about how companies like Amazon are evil. If Amazon is to present versions of itself on-screen, then surely it would make sense for those depictions to be propaganda for the company, positive or even neutral depictions like the company’s appearance in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland.

There is maybe something darkly funny in this. This is the most absurd timeline after all. Last year, writer and director Sam Esmail closed his apocalyptic Netflix movie Leave the World Behind with what is effectively a loving ode to the importance and the joy of physical media. Naturally, Netflix is now selling popcorn but remains “actively hostile” to the idea of releasing its films and shows on home media. Sometimes irony is just irony.

However, it seems safe to say that there is a larger trend at work. A lot of contemporary pop culture is openly suspicious – if not outright contemptuous – of capitalism as a concept. Amazon is far from the only streaming service to get in on this. Apple produces Severance, a show that – according to Alison Willmore – depicts “how cultish postwar American capitalism can look to anyone outside its beating heart.” Apple is the largest company in the world by market cap.

It isn’t as if these themes sneak into these shows by accident. These companies are not so careless as to be unaware of the content of their content. These corporations often have to be more careful about what they produce, given their network of international relationships are far more complex than traditional movie or television producers. Apple parted ways with Jon Stewart when The Problem with Jon Stewart threatened to tackle potentially uncomfortable subjects for the company.

Still, capitalism is a central preoccupation of modern pop culture. It’s reflected with various shades of enthusiasm in the recent wave of “buy-o-pics” like Flamin’ Hot, Blackberry and AIR. It intersects with racism and misogyny in The Killers of the Flower Moon. It filters through the apocalyptic nightmares of Loki and the fascist dictatorships of Andor. Indeed, looking at the current pop culture landscape, it seems like it’s just good business to be anti-capitalist.

There is an inherent cynicism at play here. While these criticisms of capitalist excess undoubtedly play well to increasingly radicalized young audiences skeptical of the status quo, they also help prop up these gigantic faceless conglomerates. The Boys is one of the biggest shows on Prime Video and has transformed itself into a franchise worthy of Vought with spin-offs like Diabolical and Gen V. Fallout was the most-watched show on streaming in April 2024.

This has always been that way. “Capitalism devours everything,” argued Spanish museum director Ivan de la Nuez, “even its worst enemies.” He was talking, of course, about the ubiquity of the image of Che Guevera, the Communist revolutionary whose face adorns countless posters and t-shirts. In October 2007, Marc Lacey discovered that Che Guevera was a commodity even in Cuba, reporting that one local shop owner simply commented, “He sells.”

More recently, the mask from V for Vendetta has become indelibly associated with populist uprisings around the world. Time named the protesters wearing that mask as their “Person of the Year” for 2011. Of course, those masks have to come from somewhere. Rubies Costume Company reportedly sold “100,000 a year worldwide” at the height of the protests, which undoubtedly contributed significantly to “to the $28 billion in revenue Time Warner accumulated” in 2010.

To be fair, The Boys is smart enough to understand this. One of the most consistently hilarious (and grim) jokes in the show is the way that Vought International cynically and shallowly panders to progressive causes to boost its bottom line while actively facilitating the transformation of the United States into a dystopian authoritarian capitalist hellscape. The series has landed pitch-perfect parodies of the infamous Kendall Jenner Pepsi advertisement and corporate rainbow-washing.

Worse than this simple cynicism, there is a sense in which these shows might actively numb audiences to the very real horrors perpetuated by these massive corporations by reducing them to mere popcorn entertainment. After all, there are seemingly a lot of Star Wars fans that enjoy unironically rooting for the Empire. Amazon sells a line of Vought International products and even opened a Planet Vought restaurant. Maybe audiences just don’t care about this sort of thing.

There is perhaps a fear that these absurdist parodies of capitalist excess essentially serve the same function as all those self-aware jokes in modern superhero movies, a way of insulating these companies and services from criticism by demonstrating that they are “in” on the joke. Amazon doesn’t just know all of the criticism that a reasonable observer could make of them, it produces two smash hit streaming shows that hammer those points over and over again. Amazon gets it.

It’s a reflection of the contradictions and complexities of late-stage capitalism. Capitalism coopts even criticism of itself, finding a way to extract value from a broad sense of unease about its recent excesses. However, even neatly packaged and sold to boost the shareholders’ bottom line, criticism of capitalism is still criticism of capitalism. The Boys and Fallout give these criticisms one of the biggest and most accessible platforms imaginable. That’s a pretty big deal.