The Boys Season Four

A tentpole Amazon Prime series, The Boys recently had its Season Four trailer drop last week, already racking up nearly nine million views on YouTube as of this writing.

The first thirty seconds of the trailer are slow and atmospheric, with pulsing synths, reverberant piano, and a bit of epic percussion—highlighting team members—leading up to Butcher’s dramatic one-liner (“I can’t do it without you”).

Along with a sweeping bird's-eye view shot, a trailerized version of “Running the World” by Jarvis Cocker enters at 0:31, with lyrics interspersed between dialogue, delivered by Homelander (Antony Starr) who warns his team of coming problems. The arrangement with pulsing synths and occasional piano notes continues with Cocker’s distinctive voice. There’s probably multifaceted reasoning behind its inclusion; for one, the lyrics have an obvious intertextual component, resonating with one of the main themes of the show regarding corrupted power in world order. In addition to this, although the song was first released in 2006, it’s also enjoyed a relatively recent resurgence in popularity through a re-release in 2019, in collaboration with the Kaiser Quartett. Though not the main reason for its inclusion, there’s a fair chance the public might have some familiarity with it, in addition to its lyrical salience.

At the one-minute mark, the music pauses again for a one-liner about Ashley, this time leaning on the side of humorous. This doesn’t last along, however, as it is quickly juxtaposed with a more insidious-sounding synth at 1:03 with a line of dialogue to match (“the whole world is about to burn”). At 1:30 we get the chorus of the song, with gunshots and other action synched to the tune at nearly every possible moment. However, a new technique that we don’t remember hearing before occurs at 2:22, at one of the main characters, Homelander maniacally laughs in a triplet that’s synched to the epic percussion—it leans into this arguably overused trailer music trope to the extent that it actually renews its novelty. Notice also how the laugh enters before the on-screen visual and ends with a visual blackout—the laugh supersedes the visual on both ends of the edit, thereby foregrounding our attention to it. Then, after outrageously fragmentary visuals to double-time percussion, Butcher’s turn phrase “You’re all f**king welcome” is also certain to pique fans of the show. A final reprise of the song leads us out along with the main title card at 2:27.

Overall, the song choice of “Running the World” is savvy—it has clear ties to the series’ plot and leverages recent (and current) zeitgeist without superseding the series itself, which as it enters its fourth season doesn’t need a more popular song to help form an identity in the ears and eyes of its audience. Moreover, some fairly innovative editing—in particular, with the inclusion of Homelander’s precisely synched laugh—helps lend the trailer its identity, despite the use of fairly standard editing tropes in other segments.

Season four of The Boys launches on June 13th.

— Curtis Perry