Crossed. I’m actually concerned. Crossed is awful. I mean I loved it, but I don’t see how it could be put in front of anyone and not be considered smut.
What else though? The Boys isn't just gore and nudity, but actually has an intriguing story & characters. If it is just hyper violence and sex, then I don't think I'd be too interested in it, because that's not what ultimately makes The Boys so great.
I also read some of that and I agree. It's totally off the rails in terms of shock value. I can't imagine they would try to go even close to as intense as the comic cause it would be even more disturbing in live action.
Can you imagine the actors taking direction? “In this scene you’ve just given birth and you’re goimg to use the newborn to bludgeon these other folks…”
Haven't read it, but it's about an apocalyptic scenario where normal people turn into absolute psychopaths. The Asian movie The Sadness has a similar premise.
There are different story lines, but the world is one where there is an infection that basically damages the parts of people's brains that are responsible for morality. They can think and talk, but there is zero impulse control. Lots of rape and murder. It's pretty fucked. I didn't read all of what's out there but what I did read was bleak at best.
It usually follows a small group of survivors a la walking dead.
No it won’t. It may start out as that in the idea room, but the thing that is released will be typical Hollywood drivel. Sure, it may be R rated, but it’ll be very safe.
Crossed had a lot of good moments, but also was a product of its time. It relied a lot on shock value derived from gratuitous displays to carry certain points of the story. While this wasn't that uncommon for that era of graphic novels, the world has changed a lot in the past decade and a half. Audiences have become a lot more desensitized to this kind of stuff. A lot of scenes that would have been met with some level of horror/disgust when first published would now be met with eye rolls and comments about the author's sexual preferences.
In addition, when it comes to any nerd IP, Hollywood has a habit of dumbing everything down to an extreme degree while simultaneously acting like they are absolutely geniuses speaking harsh truths. If anyone points out that what they're making kind of just sucks, they'll be a million and one fly by night journalists implying that critics are just bigots in some way.
The latest season of The Boys provides a good example of this. The writing fell off a cliff. A ton of stuff was deliberately over the top for no other purposes to induce shock value, yet somehow still undermined previous parts of the show. The social commentary got flanderized to the point where a lot of it was absolutely braindead. Despite all of this, Hollywood will insist that this season is as good as ever and the only people complaining are MAGA bigots who can't handle criticism, despite said criticism being fairly blatant since season 1.