Hello, Internet! Welcome to Film Theory, the show that knows that translucent doesn't mean invisible, it means semi-transparent.
So, how about The Boys, huh?
Back in the late 2010s, a time when superheroes ruled the pop culture roost, this Amazon TV series burst through the wall and said no.
Trust me, you do not want these guys to be real.
If you aren't familiar, The Boys is a satirical series that imagines what a world with superheroes would really look like.
And oh man, is this show a bloody good time in a lot of different ways.
And while there are tons of smaller heroes with superpowers in this world, the biggest and most popular of them all team up into a supergroup known as The Seven.
And these guys aren't the type of heroes that you'd expect.
No, they're not Boy Scouts or friendly neighborhood warriors, they're corrupt.
They're self-serving and they're dealing with real-world problems like addiction, insecurity, and egotism.
Killing most criminals in their crosshairs, as well as plenty of innocents along the way.
The world of this series is incredible.
But today, I wanted to take a look at one very specific hero.
The biggest and definitely baddest one of them all, Homelander.
I'm not just like the rest of you.
I'm stronger, I'm smarter, I'm better.
I am better!
Homelander is basically this world's version of all the oldest superhero tropes.
He can fly, he's super strong and fast, he's basically invulnerable, and he has himself heat vision.
All while literally being wrapped in an American flag.
And this is why Homelander caught the attention of my theorist brain so quickly.
In this show that leans so heavily on the realistic consequences of superheroes,
got me wondering, just how super is this superest of supes?
And by that I mean, how strong is Homelander?
Given what we see him do across the series, what are some real numbers to Homelander's power?
And what would his biggest strength be?
Well, loyal theorists, here's the craziest part.
The thing that I think is Homelander's biggest strength definitely isn't what you'd expect.
And I also think it's his biggest weakness.
And knowing what that is, is gonna tell us a lot about where the story of the boys is headed in future seasons.
But before we hop into the strength of this megacorporation superhero,
let's talk about the strength of our latest round of theorywear, the Northern Lights Collection.
So it's just business tonight?
When, Mr. Butcher, in history, has it ever been about anything different?
Right now, Stan, because theorywear isn't just regular old merch anymore.
It's not just logos that we're slapping onto t-shirts to make a quick buck.
These are actual pieces of clothing that'll be useful to you in your everyday life, while looking darn good wearing them.
The perfect example of this has gotta be our new Polar Embrace gloves.
Which we designed to be both waterproof and insulated, so your fingers can stay toasty on those early morning commutes to work or school.
But best of all, these things have touchscreen fingers, letting you use your phone or tablet without having to take them off.
That means you don't need to give yourself frostbite every time you rewind episodes of The Boys to hear their wild one-liners.
Do you know what a GPS is? Or, or Bluetooth? Or, I mean, the internet?
You made those words up.
But of course, a pair of gloves is best complemented with a nice, cozy jacket.
And thankfully for you, we have a ton of options available, like the Field Watch Heavy Fleece.
Not only is this jacket super heavyweight, covered in a soft fleece material, but it's designed to keep you cozy even in below freezing temperatures.
Bundle up in this bad boy and feel like you have the power of heat at your fingertips anywhere you go.
Our whole mission with the Northern Lights collection was to make winter clothing that's gonna make you feel warm and cozy as the weather cools down.
We also wanted these pieces to be able to live on in your wardrobe for years to come.
Staying fashionable and useful long into the future.
And I gotta say, I think we've managed to do it.
So please, go check out the Northern Lights collection over at TheoryWear.com.
But that's enough shameless self-promotion for now. Let's get back to The Boys, shall we?
So to figure out what Homelander's most powerful abilities are, I figure that we need to first decide which powers we're actually gonna measure.
For today's purposes, I've narrowed it down to the three that I think are his most iconic.
Super strength, how fast he can move, and heat vision.
So let's just look at the science behind each of these and see what we can dig up, starting with Homelander's super strength.
So far, the boys have really held back from showing Homelander undergoing the sorts of godlike feats of strength that we typically see in other superhero shows.
He hasn't lifted a car with one finger, or stopped a building from collapsing, or held a boat together with his bare hands, or anything like that.
Now, that's not to say that he couldn't do things like that.
When it's suggested that he save an airplane full of passengers from crashing, his reasons for not doing it have nothing to do with a lack of strength, but rather a lack of things to stand on.
Lift the plane up.
Lift the plane? How? There's nothing to stand on.
But if he were standing on solid ground, assuming it's at its maximum takeoff load, lifting this Boeing 737
means that Homelander could shoulder 430,000 pounds, or about 195,000 kilograms, no problem.
And if we want to bring comic evidence into this, that version of Homelander was able to grab an F-16 fighter jet weighing roughly
20,000 pounds, or 9,200 kilograms, with a single hand and easily toss it across an airport hangar in annoyance.
All that said, we do see other feats of strength throughout the show, with Homelander casually throwing people around
like it's nothing, physically punching through human bodies, crushing human skulls like a nut.
It is all very violent and very gruesome and very YouTube unfriendly, so you're just gonna have to trust me on all this.
Just from these feats of strength alone, we can get an idea of how crazy powerful Homelander actually is.
One study stated that crushing a human skull would require up to 1,200 pounds of force, which would be like putting your head inside of a hydraulic press machine.
And this was something that Homelander did with a single hand while distracted.
As for punching through a human chest, unsurprisingly, it's difficult to find information about how much force you need to break through the human sternum with the human fist.
I wonder why that might be hard to find. Go figure.
But you know what? We don't actually need those numbers to calculate the wild strength that Homelander demonstrates in this one scene.
As he pulls his fist out of this guy, much to his annoyance, it's covered in blood.
That means that his punch actually broke through the skin, which takes a lot more force for a blunt object than you might expect.
It takes roughly 100 pounds per square inch of pressure to puncture through human skin.
And given that a human fist is roughly 64 square inches in surface area, that means that Homelander needed to apply 6,400 PSI on this dude in order to get his hand bloody.
An average boxer, by comparison, can deliver between 1,200 and 1,700 PSI, which is basically the same level of pressure as an industrial pressure washer.
Now imagine that, but three times worse, and it was nothing to Homelander.
And if you think that's scary, it's not even the most strength that we see him using.
In the very first scene of the show, we see Homelander casually tossing a bank robber away after saving two kids that he was holding at gunpoint.
I was actually able to figure out roughly where the scene takes place, thanks to the street signs.
Going through it frame by frame, you can see signs for Borum Place and Smith Street, real locations in Brooklyn, New York.
Thankfully, this means that we're able to get a pretty good idea of how far Homelander threw the thug,
since a standard New York City block is about 264 feet by 900 feet, or about 80 meters by 274.
Using that, I was able to estimate that the robber was thrown about 135 feet.
He was in the air for roughly 6.1 seconds, and plugging all of that into a projectile motion calculator,
we'll find that he was thrown at about 68 miles an hour, 30.5 meters a second.
Assuming that this dude weighed as much as an average American male, and plugging all of that into a kinetic energy formula,
we'll find that Homelander threw this guy with a wild 42,000 joules of energy.
To give you a frame of reference, that would be 26 times harder than boxing legend Mike Tyson can punch.
Okay, so Homelander's physical strength is incredible, but that doesn't matter a whole lot if he's not fast enough to land a punch.
But don't you worry, my friends, he is more than fast enough to land a blow that'll rip through someone's chest easily.
Both on foot and flying through the air, Homelander is tremendously fast.
We see this clearly demonstrated the multiple times he catches up with planes mid-flight,
but that is nowhere near Homelander's most impressive feat of speed.
Nope, that honor goes to this scene from the finale of Season 1.
After confronting Boys Leader Billy Butcher in a house that's been rigged with C4 explosives,
Butcher detonates them, hoping to hurt Homelander and himself.
However, Homelander is able to move quickly enough not only to save himself from the explosive blast, but Butcher as well.
C4's velocity of detonation, or the rate at which it explodes, is about 26,400 feet a second.
That is 18,000 miles per hour, 29,000 kilometers an hour.
Now, you can obviously tell that that is ludicrously fast,
but moving that quickly also means that Homelander would be creating bone-crunching amounts of energy.
Using the equation force equals mass times acceleration,
we can figure out that Homelander is generating a crazy 700,000 newtons of force just from moving.
Now, that might be nothing to Homelander, but you gotta remember, he's also moving Butcher at this speed,
which would almost certainly kill him,
because that force is roughly 10 times worse than what you'd feel during a 40 mile per hour head-on crash.
So in saving Butcher in the scene, Homelander actually kind of killed him,
which, you know, would save him a lot of trouble further in the series.
While super speed and physical strength are both wildly powerful abilities,
the flashiest of Homelander's superpowers and the one he leans on the most is undoubtedly his laser vision.
In fact, he uses it so much, and it's such a big part of the show's marketing,
that I'd classify this as his signature ability.
But just how powerful is it?
Is it the strongest ability?
After all, we see him do everything from use it to melt guns to cut through humans like they're butter.
So to calculate what I figured would be the upper range of the amount of energy Homelander can output through his eyes,
I decided to use this scene where he cuts through a private jet in just 0.96 seconds.
How'd I figure it out? Well, there's a lot of complicated math, but here's the long and short of it.
We were able to figure out that the plane used in the scene was a British Aerospace 125,
and though we couldn't find the exact materials this model of plane is made from,
most commercial aircraft are made using aluminum, titanium, and steel.
We're just gonna be using aluminum to keep things simple, and to underestimate his power in this case.
Using the Aerospace's height, length, and hull thickness,
we were able to estimate that he was able to melt roughly 115.7 kilograms of aluminum in that 0.9 seconds.
Insane!
Using the average width of a pair of human eyes as the size of our laser beams,
assuming that the hull is made of aluminum, and that the temperature of the hull is about negative 40 degrees Celsius,
or the warmer end of the outside of an airplane at cruising altitude,
with some back-in-the-napkin math, we can calculate that Homelander's less than one second of heat vision here
transferred a massive 73,052,980 joules of energy directly to the metal on that plane.
That is over 20 kilowatt hours, or a little less than what you'd need to power an average house for an entire day,
all from Homelander just looking at something really hard for less than a second.
And believe it or not, all of these assumptions were actually just low-balling the amount of energy Homelander's outputting in the scene.
We were giving him the easiest possible scenario here.
And it's also not saying anything about his ability to control the intensity of those eye-beams.
He's able to heat up a bottle of milk without melting the bottle or boiling the liquid.
That right there tells us that Homelander is just really good at figuring out the thermodynamics of objects around him,
knowing how much energy his eye-beams need to output to heat milk, but also to melt aluminum depending on the circumstance.
That is an insane amount of control, and probably a stronger ability than just lifting things or moving fast.
So it is clear that Homelander is just ridiculously powerful.
But here's the thing. While his physical prowess is unmatched,
I actually don't believe that that's what makes Homelander the most powerful of superheroes.
Instead, Homelander's biggest strength, the thing that makes him the most powerful and the scariest of all the Supes,
it's his brand. Let me explain.
Superheroes are big business in the real world, with the corporations who own them bringing in billions from those IP.
In 2013 alone, the most popular superheroes generated between 275 million and 1.3 billion each,
just from merchandise retail sales alone, in a single year.
As the most powerful Supe in the world and the leader of the seven, between movies and action figures and whatever,
Homelander's brand should easily be making at least the lower end of that margin within the world of The Boys.
And that's not even considering the military contracts that Homelander's able to bring in for the Vought Company.
Additionally, it's very clear that Supes in this universe function very similar to real-world influencers,
and they have way more power than you might think.
First of all, if we want to continue the cash talk, they can command huge sums of money in multiple ways.
Popular athletes and YouTubers are often worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.
Multiple soccer players were offered $1 billion contracts that they turned down, by the way,
because as one article put it, quote,
Most soccer fans around the world now follow players, not teams.
Which makes a lot of sense when you consider that two of these players have between 100 and 480 million social media followers.
That's in the same range as the 193 million followers that Starlight has in the world of The Boys over on Instagram.
And though she's touted as the most followed Supe, Homelander has to have himself similar numbers.
Building off of that, these insane follower counts give influencers massive amounts of power.
Oh sure, MrBeast was able to leverage his subscriber base to get Beast Burger into the $100 million revenue range,
but what's even more impressive was that he was able to keep the Feastables chocolate bar displays in retail stores clean
simply by asking fans to tidy them up for him.
Which they did, all without pay, just because he asked them nicely.
And it's not just their own stuff that these influencers can push their followers towards.
They are able to get their followers to buy other people's stuff too.
According to an advertiser report from Precise TV and Giraffe Insights,
almost half of teens remember seeing ads on platforms like YouTube.
60% consider watching them instead of skipping the ad, and 70% have bought something that they've seen.
Heck, if you want to take money out of this entirely, 86% of young Americans want to become social media influencers
because they look up to people like YouTubers and TikTokers.
And this is definitely the way that Supes like Homelander are treated in The Boys.
I mean, just look at the interaction that Homelander has with the two kids that he saves.
You boys okay?
Can I get a selfie?
Of course you can.
This isn't the way people react after being saved from a bank robbery.
This is how people react when meeting a celebrity they adore and look up to.
But this doesn't even stop there.
Given all of this, all the power that Homelander's accrued through money and cultural influence,
that's not even the thing that gives him the most power.
Because he also has the full backing of a multi-billion dollar conglomerate.
By the end of Season 3 of The Boys, Homelander takes control of Vought International,
installing Ashley Barrett, somebody he considers a close ally that he can control, as CEO.
In essence, this gives Homelander CEO control of the corporation that not only owns the legal entity that is his brand,
but also most other licensed superheroes throughout the world.
And there is no overselling just how much power or how many resources this affords Homelander.
In 2018, 14 of the top 30 most powerful people in the world,
ranked by Forbes, were executives at conglomerates,
right there alongside leaders of world superpowers.
And given the social media marketing for The Boys,
Vought is using all of its power to make sure Homelander's reputation is upheld.
He's got a propaganda machine at his fingertips.
In the coming months, Homelander will stand trial for saving his son from a vicious, starlight-loving thug.
An act of heroism, now somehow being branded a murder.
Make no mistake, Vought and its shareholders stand fully behind Homelander.
Really, at this point, there's only one place left for Homelander to go.
Only one place that he could get even stronger.
I believe that next season, Homelander is gonna run for President of the United States.
Now, if that sounds outlandish, it shouldn't.
This didn't happen in the comics, but the show's already diverged a lot from that story,
so it's clearly doing its own thing.
Plus, there's already an election going on in the world of The Boys.
And think about how much time the show's devoted to Homelander caring so much about where he sat with his base.
-"21 points."
-"They loved your speech?"
-"A massive 44% uptake with white males in the Rust Belt."
This isn't talk that you see with celebrities.
These are the concerns of a politician.
And if you think it's ridiculous that Homelander, the influencer superhero, could be leader of the free world,
remember, someone who was also an influencer and CEO,
who used that to run a campaign that earned billions of dollars in free advertising,
eventually winning the White House in the real world.
So sure, Homelander could level cities with a look,
he could carry airplanes on his shoulders,
he could punch through a human body just by walking at a brisk pace,
but none of that compares to the power of influence.
And herein lies our last little twist, loyal theorists,
because this greatest strength is also gonna be Homelander's biggest weakness.
Clearly, there isn't a lot that can actually hurt Homelander.
We can count the times he's been physically beaten and actually injured on a single hand.
Those barely slowed him down.
But while he has all the power and influence and the love of millions,
it has built a larger-than-life ego.
Combine that with his fragile state of mind,
the fact that he craves all of that attention,
that right there, that's the way to take him down.
You might not be able to physically overpower and destroy Homelander the man,
but you can destroy Homelander the brand, the idea, the character.
And once you do that, the man implodes on himself.
But hey, it's all just a theory.
A FILM THEORY!
Aaaaand cut.