For the handful of us who caught Macon Blair’s Troma remake The Toxic Avenger at its world premiere at Fantastic Fest back in 2023, it’s been a long, confusing wait for the movie to finally get a public release. The movie is a gory, silly horror-comedy full of over-the-top deaths designed to make horror-heads howl with glee. It’s anchored by a soulful performance from Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage as the mutated monster-hero, and by a gleefully goofy villain turn from Kevin Bacon, who devours every scrap of scenery within reach. It’s hitting theaters Aug. 29, almost two full years after that premiere. But why did distribution take so long?
“I think broadly, it was just that the places that normally buy movies had a hard time seeing its potential as a mainstream crowd-pleaser,” Blair told Polygon via Zoom. “People were a little gun-shy, which is a little nerve-wracking. But in hindsight, I’m very grateful for the delay, because it allowed Cineverse to get into position to take it over. And they really did see the potential for it to be a crowd-pleaser, so that’s how they’re trying to release it — not just dumping it onto a [streaming] platform, but really trying to get it out there [in theaters].”
Blair, a writer, producer, and actor who’s frequently partnered with Rebel Ridge’s Jeremy Saulnier (and who starred in Saulnier’s terrific breakout movie, Blue Ruin), made his own directorial debut with 2017’s Netflix dark comedy I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore. The Toxic Avenger, a remake of Troma’s defining 1984 cult classic, is the second movie he’s directed, and his first chance to really go big — big-name actors; big, broad comedy; and especially big, gnarly death sequences.
“My favorite kill in this would be the one at the end of the movie, where the guy gets his head in the engine block,” he says. “That’s something I wrote into other scripts that I was never able to get made, and it is so preposterous and ridiculous — I was very grateful that I finally got a chance to do it in this one.”
The Toxic Avenger’s deleted and altered scenes
Blair says the version of Toxic Avenger coming to theaters is almost exactly the same cut that premiered two years ago. “There are a few shots that have been adjusted, and a few things that have been added, but I would say 98% the same thing. There are little extra details added in certain shots, just to make them a little more fun, but no new scenes or new cuts.”
He says all the scenes he had to remove from the movie were cut early on, before the premiere, and entirely for pacing purposes. “I really miss them, but we made the right choice to cut them out. I think the movie plays better when it’s snappy. But they were hard scenes to let go. I really liked the performances in them, and I’m hopeful that maybe there’ll be a DVD edition at some point where people can see them.”
One of those cut scenes — the one Blair considers his favorite — was a flashback that came right in the middle of the movie’s climactic battle scene. “Toxie gets knocked on the head, and the screen goes black, and he kind of goes back in time for a minute, and has a scene where he is interacting with his wife when she was alive,” Blair said. “It was this weird left turn, and then the fight picks up again.
“I think audiences were like, Is the fight over? What are we doing here? I loved it, but I understood the need to lose it. It was a very sweet scene between Peter and this actress named Rebecca O’Mara, who gave a really lovely performance. Maybe someday folks will get to see it.”
The Toxic Avenger in the Trump era
It’s possible that the movie might play differently in 2025 than it did in 2023, under an administration that’s dissolving environmental protections and openly serving America’s wealthiest citizens. Everything about the movie seems primed to address the current moment: Its environmental message, its eat-the-rich theme, and its plotline about Dinklage’s character Winston desperately trying to access health care. Bacon plays a rich industrialist, Bob Garbinger, who’s gleefully pumping toxic chemicals into the environment while exploiting and discarding workers like Winston, whose work in Garbinger’s unsafe factory has left him fatally ill.
Despite the resonance with the current administration’s actions, Blair says the movie is depressingly timeless. “It was written three years before it premiered, and I was thinking about things from decades before that,” he says. “So I hate to say it, but this type of story never goes out of style. I think it would’ve been relevant in 1920, or the 1980s. There’s always going to be some version of that — the extraordinarily rich getting to do what they want at the expense of people who are squeezed out.”
He says his Toxic Avenger isn’t meant as “a thoughtful analysis” of environmental exploitation or the predation of the ultra-rich. “It’s just a reflection of This kind of sucks, and How can we make a ridiculous fantasy story within that? But I think it would’ve been relevant any old time, unfortunately.”
In part, Blair says the remake was inspired by events from the late 1980s and early 1990s. “When I was in high school, there all of a sudden seemed to be this focus on environmental concerns — there was Captain Planet, and Earth Day became a big thing,” he said. “And then you’re suddenly getting movies like The Toxic Avenger, which is all about They’re dumping toxic sludge illegally, and Robocop — it seemed to be this current thread.
“I wanted not necessarily to address one particular concern, but to make a movie that felt like it felt to watch movies when I was a kid, and have that vibe be part of the vibe of this one.”
Cartoon horror, Peter Dinklage, and Kevin Bacon
Blair says he isn’t as much of a fan of dramatic, intense horror movies as he used to be. “I like the more serious, heavy movies, but I find them a little harder to get through if they’re punishing. As I get older and older, I find less and less enjoyment in just watching cold suffering on screen. I get further and further away from that with each passing year.” But gruesome horror-comedy like Toxic Avenger is different, in part because it takes him back to his earliest filmmaking experiments.
“Having [screen violence] contextualized in this cartoonish, lighthearted way takes me back to me with my friends and a half-inch videotape camera, figuring out how to do squibs with Ziploc bags, and blood we made up,” Blair said. “That sort of thing is fun. I don’t see [violence in horror-comedies] as a reflection of the real world — to me, it’s more like kids getting messy in art class. It’s all kind of cartoonish.”
Dinklage and Bacon have each taken broad comedy roles before, though that isn’t what either of them are best known for. Blair says there was no previous role in either case that made him reach out to them for his Toxic Avenger.
“I knew they were both really tremendous actors, and I knew that they both had really great senses of humor, both on-screen and also about themselves,” he said. “What I responded to is — you can see this in the videos Kevin posts online — they don’t seem to take themselves all that seriously. I had a suspicion that they would have fun with this. I felt like it was worth sending the script to them.
“And it turns out they did respond to it and they were looking to have fun in this, with a sort of overheated, turned-up-to-11 type of performance. That’s what I was hoping for — there’s just something delightful to me about taking these very respectable movie stars and having them appear in this cartoonish sort of context.”
The Toxic Avenger opens in U.S. theaters on Aug. 29.
