{"id":119740,"date":"2025-08-30T01:33:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T01:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/119740\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T01:33:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T01:33:10","slug":"the-toxic-avenger-director-rejects-2024s-unreleasable-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/119740\/","title":{"rendered":"The Toxic Avenger Director Rejects 2024’s \u201cUnreleasable\u201d Report"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMacon Blair<\/a> has had a charmed run since 2013\u2019s Cannes Film Festival.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s when he and childhood best friend Jeremy Saulnier<\/a> turned heads with their micro-budget revenge thriller, Blue Ruin<\/a>. In 2015, Saulnier directed Blair in yet another critically acclaimed thriller known as Green Room<\/a>. The following year, Blair moved into the director\u2019s chair on I Don\u2019t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, which landed the dramatic grand jury prize at 2017\u2019s Sundance Film Festival. Blair and Saulnier would then link back up for the latter\u2019s 2018 film, Hold the Dark, which counted Blair as screenwriter and actor.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe current decade is when the fortunes would temporarily change for the producing partners at Bonneville Pictures. In 2020, the pandemic would help turn Saulnier\u2019s latest film, Rebel Ridge<\/a>, into a five-year crucible, while Blair started to assemble his reboot of Troma Entertainment\u2019s 1984 cult hit, The Toxic Avenger<\/a>. The first person he thought for the title character of \u201cToxie\u201d was Peter Dinklage<\/a>. The pair struck up a friendship after Dinklage served on the Sundance jury that honored Blair\u2019s feature directorial debut in 2017.<\/p>\n

\n\tTheir superhero splatter film about a janitor (Dinklage\u2019s Winston Gooze) who\u2019s had enough of the corporate malfeasance around him, would go on to shoot in mid-2021. It then hit the festival circuit in the fall of 2023 to nearly universal acclaim. However, the road to distribution hit an unexpected snag. A report eventually circulated in mid-2024, citing an anonymous producer who described the film as \u201cunreleasable\u201d due to its niche tone of black comedy and gore, a Troma trademark.<\/p>\n

\n\tBlair rejects this report for the simple fact that his production company, Legendary Pictures, was in active negotiations at the time of said report. (Troma Entertainment is also a co-producer on the project.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen that headline came out, Legendary was still in ongoing conversations with multiple places, so it wasn\u2019t unreleasable. It took a minute, for sure, but that was an exaggeration that got out of hand,\u201d Blair tells The Hollywood Reporter.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn January 2025, fresh off the massive success of Terrifier 3, Cineverse acquired the distribution rights for The Toxic Avenger. Blair\u2019s film, which is now certified fresh via Rotten Tomatoes, would receive a marketing push that included its recent appearance at San Diego Comic-Con, as well as this weekend\u2019s theatrical release. The Virginia native never lost faith that his film would see the light of day, but in a time where movies like Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme are permanently or temporarily buried for tax benefits, he couldn\u2019t help but have some dark nights of the soul.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt breaks my heart, but you hear stories about movies like [Coyote vs. Acme or Batgirl] that get vanished, so it\u2019s hard not to have that cross your mind a little bit,\u201d Blair admits. \u201cBut I knew that the folks at Legendary were so passionate about it that [burying the film for a tax write-off] was not on the table for them. I was still nervously thinking, \u2018Oh shit, it\u2019s taking a little bit longer than I would like.\u2019 But I had faith that they were going to figure it out sooner or later, and they did.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring Blair\u2019s distribution struggles, he had many conversations with Saulnier amid his own production hurdles on Rebel Ridge. Like The Toxic Avenger, Rebel Ridge also had a happy ending that included widespread critical acclaim and a star-making turn by Aaron Pierre. Blair\u2019s role as J. Robert Oppenheimer\u2019s lawyer in Christopher Nolan\u2019s best picture-winning Oppenheimer ultimately prevented him from appearing in Rebel Ridge. But as Saulnier\u2019s producing partner, he, too, was named as part of the Netflix film\u2019s recent Emmy nomination for outstanding \u201ctelevision movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere were those [cathartic] conversations [throughout our five years\u2019 worth of setbacks]. I know it was hard for [Saulnier], just as it was hard for us to juggle this period of [The Toxic Avenger] being in limbo,\u201d Blair recalls. \u201cBut at the end of the day, he came out of it with one of the best movies of the year, and I got to have a release with Cineverse. The Toxic Avenger is going to be in theaters, and it\u2019s going to fucking Comic-Con. This is well beyond my expectations for this movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDue to production on his next directorial effort, Blair, as an actor, is about to miss his second consecutive Saulnier film, but he\u2019ll still be an EP on October, his friend\u2019s Halloween-set fugitive thriller for A24.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m going to be working on my own movie that\u2019s going to be shooting at the same time,\u201d Blair says. \u201cWe still talk all the time, we still have a company together and we\u2019re still brothers. So at some point we\u2019ll do something together again, but probably not October.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBelow, during a conversation with THR that predated late July\u2019s San Diego Comic-Con, Blair also discusses why he didn\u2019t turn his Toxic Avenger into another trendy legacy sequel.<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tYou initially screened The Toxic Avenger at Fantastic Fest in September of 2023. The reactions and reviews were nearly universally positive. What happened or didn\u2019t happen from there?<\/p>\n

\n\tWell, we had one more really dope screening at Beyond Fest in L.A. It had a very similar audience vibe, and they really loved it too. So I came out of that thinking, \u201cOh, we can skate into some kind of distribution deal.\u201d But I should have known better.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tI don\u2019t know what the actual particulars were; I was not involved in the day-to-day conversations. I know Legendary, the studio that produced it, worked really, really hard. They chased the property and partnered with Troma to begin with, and they were totally behind it through all of production and post. So I know they were trying to get it going, but for whatever reason, it just didn\u2019t work for the usual mainstream outlets. I never got any particulars. I was never told anything specific. It was just not what they were looking for.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in that interim, Cineverse got to a place where they could really put their arms around it. And when they came on board, it was really exciting because they weren\u2019t saying, \u201cOh, this is something that we have to just get out there. We\u2019ll put it on a streaming platform where it\u2019ll vanish.\u201d They\u2019ve been able to get the movie out there in a very enthusiastic way, which includes a theatrical component. So I\u2019m delighted, and the couple of years of waiting ended up being totally worth it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tScreenwriter\/Director Macon Blair on the set of 2025\u2019s The Toxic Avenger<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tYana Blajeva\/Legendary Pictures<\/p>\n

\n\tDue to the film\u2019s tone, words like \u201cunreleasable\u201d and \u201cunmarketable\u201d were thrown out there. Were you ever asked to reopen the hood of the movie and create another cut?<\/p>\n

\n\tNo, not at all. When I saw that headline that said it\u2019s \u201cunreleasable,\u201d it made it sound like it was so gross that it\u2019s unreleasable. And in a way, that helps gets people interested, but it\u2019s not that fucking movie. It\u2019s a gentle R-rated movie. It\u2019s not that extreme. So cutting sections out of it wouldn\u2019t have really changed it anyway, and I think the mainstream outlets were just not digging the vibe of it. But I never got the sense that it was too extreme or the content needed to be reined in. At any rate, nobody ever suggested that to me, and I don\u2019t think it would\u2019ve changed anything, really.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tI think that \u201cunreleasable\u201d quote was a game of telephone that got out of hand. I suspect that somebody somewhere was like, \u201cIt\u2019s having a hard time getting distributed,\u201d and then somebody else extrapolated that it\u2019s unreleasable or something like that. Even when that headline came out, Legendary was still in ongoing conversations with multiple places, so it wasn\u2019t unreleasable. It took a minute, for sure, but that was an exaggeration that got out of hand.<\/p>\n

\n\tDid you ever completely lose faith that it would see the light of day?<\/p>\n

\n\tNo, but I did get worried. It breaks my heart, but you hear stories about movies like [Coyote vs. Acme or Batgirl] that get vanished, so it\u2019s hard not to have that cross your mind a little bit. But I knew that the folks at Legendary \u2014\u00a0specifically the executive that I was working with, Alex Garcia \u2014 were so passionate about it that [burying the film for a tax write-off] was not on the table for them. I was still nervously thinking, \u201cOh shit, it\u2019s taking a little bit longer than I would like,\u201d but I knew that they were still working really hard on it. So I had faith that they were going to figure it out sooner or later, and they did.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPeter Dinklage (voice) & Luisa Guerreiro (set performer) as \u201cToxie\u201d in Macon Blair\u2019s The Toxic Avenger<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tYana Blajeva\/Legendary Pictures<\/p>\n

\n\tAs you touched on, Cineverse, the distributor of Terrifier 3, ultimately picked it up for a theatrical release. They helped prove that there\u2019s still a theatrical demand for risqu\u00e9 genre films. Do you also credit Terrifier 3\u2019s success for your film finally being released?<\/p>\n

\n\tI don\u2019t know the specifics, but in my opinion, that\u2019s absolutely what happened. I think Terrifier 3 blew up to such a degree that it gave Cineverse some juice. And not only that, they also learned how to market this kind of movie. Now, Terrifier 3 is much more in the gore zone. That\u2019s way, way beyond what we\u2019re doing here, so it\u2019s not the same thing. But as far as a movie that\u2019s not necessarily mainstream, that\u2019s totally what they\u2019re good at. So they proved that they could do a really successful release with that movie, and it just made sense for them to step into this one. So [Terrifier 3] set the stage for our movie, and I\u2019m grateful.<\/p>\n

\n\tYour Toxic Avenger is a reimagining, not a legacy sequel. Your characters don\u2019t seek out someone from the original movie for guidance. Was that legacy sequel trend never of interest to you?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was less a matter of not wanting it to be a legacy sequel. I actually didn\u2019t think of it in those terms. It was more about what I wanted the emotional center of the movie to be. In the 1984 Toxic Avenger, bullies are picking on a teenager, and he\u2019s trying to connect with girls. It was a little more adolescent, so they nailed that. The question, when you do remakes, is: Why are we doing this at all? And my answer was that it would feel redundant if we just did that exact same thing again where a bullied teenager is working at a health club and trying to get with girls.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo, in one of the very early conversations that I had with the producers, I said that the main character should be an older guy who\u2019s dealing with something emotional between him and his kid. And his name shouldn\u2019t be Melvin [like Mitch Cohen\u2019s main character in the 1984 film]. I felt he should be an all-new guy [and an all-new Toxic Avenger] in the same way that you\u2019ve got different Captain Americas. They\u2019re all Captain America, but they\u2019re different people. So I thought about it as an all-new version of a familiar character that the fans love.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPeter Dinklage as \u201cWinston Gooze\u201d and Jacob Tremblay as \u201cWade\u201d in Macon Blair\u2019s The Toxic Avenger<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tYana Blajeva\/Legendary Pictures<\/p>\n

\n\tMaking a Troma movie in the 2020s is likely very different from the \u201880s and \u201890s. You still have plenty of their hallmarks, don\u2019t get me wrong, but was it understood from the start that you\u2019d have to dial back certain ingredients, mainly sex and nudity?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tNo, if we had wanted to have more of that in there, we could have done it. But I didn\u2019t want to have it in there just because we felt like we owed it. We also only had 90 minutes, and we couldn\u2019t have unlimited characters. And if Winston\u2019s main thing is dealing with his son, there wasn\u2019t a lot of space for shower scenes and stuff like that. So it was not a matter of us not being allowed to do this or that now. Legendary had a pretty free hand, and they were like, \u201cYou can do whatever you want.\u201d It was more about what fit with the flow of the story.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1984, pre-internet, nudity had a different place in culture. A 12-year-old kid would watch a movie and freeze-frame on a shower scene or something like that. But it\u2019s very different these days when there\u2019s gigabytes upon gigabytes of hardcore porn on your phone. So it was like, \u201cWhy are we doing this? Is it to be sexy or titillating? Who gives a fuck? Is it actually part of the story?\u201d The one time we did do it was with some flashers at the concert, and the point of it was to specifically be a joke, as opposed to something that\u2019s arousing.<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter Toxic Avenger, Peter Dinklage made Brothers, which you co-wrote. You also appeared in his film The Thicket. How much of this was by design?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen my first movie played at a film festival [Sundance] in 2017, he was there [as a juror] and he saw it. So he very kindly invited me out to lunch just to chitchat about movies, and he was like, \u201cHey, I liked your movie.\u201d It was very nice. So we ended up staying in touch, and he would send me scripts from time to time. He would ask, \u201cDo you have any thoughts about this?\u201d It was not necessarily to make it, but just to talk about scripts. I would then send him scripts and ask, \u201cDo you like this?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSo that avenue of conversation is why I got him in my head to play Winston in The Toxic Avenger. We were already talking, and it was the same thing with the other two. He was working on Brothers, and they wanted to do a new draft of the script, so he sent it to me. And then he was working on The Thicket when he recommended me to the director, Elliott Lester. So it all came out of that initial little lunch conversation that we had at [Sundance] eight years ago.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPeter Dinklage and Macon Blair on the set of 2025\u2019s The Toxic Avenger<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Legendary<\/p>\n

\n\tThe title of your first movie, I Don\u2019t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, was relevant in 2017, and it\u2019s especially relevant now.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOoh boy.<\/p>\n

\n\tHave you given any thought to a sequel of sorts?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a matter of fact, we\u2019ve talked about that. Making that movie was such a special time with that group. We still have a text thread that we started back then with the whole cast, and everybody is always checking in with each other. When things are going great, we\u2019re checking in. When things are not going great, we\u2019re checking in.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSo that idea has come up a couple of times, and it just feels like there\u2019s a way where we could see what Ruth [Melanie Lynskey] and Tony [Elijah Wood] are up to now and have another fun little adventure. It\u2019s never really gotten serious yet, but it\u2019s something I would like to do at some point. So I wouldn\u2019t say I have any active plans for it, but it is something we talk about imaginatively amongst ourselves. We talk about it quite a bit.<\/p>\n

\n\tBetween The Toxic Avenger and Jeremy Saulnier<\/a>\u2019s most recent movie, Rebel Ridge, you both got put through the wringer in a wide variety of ways. Did you guys have lots of cathartic phone calls the last five years?<\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, of course. Jeremy\u2019s was different. His movie shut down for COVID, and then it got shut down for a hurricane. Then there was a casting switch-up and everything. So, yes, there were those conversations, but then there\u2019s the other side of it. He had to go through that to wind up with Aaron Pierre and an amazing movie. I know it was hard for him, just as it was hard for us to juggle this period of [The Toxic Avenger] being in limbo.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut at the end of the day, he came out of it with one of the best movies of the year, in my opinion, and I got to have a release with Cineverse. The Toxic Avenger is going to be in theaters, and it\u2019s going to fucking Comic-Con. This is well beyond my expectations for this movie, and if waiting a couple years to get there is part of it, then that\u2019s cool. [Writer\u2019s Note: This interview was conducted prior to late July\u2019s San Diego Comic-Con.]<\/p>\n

\n\tRebel Ridge may have been my favorite film of 2024, but your physical presence was still missed. I half-jokingly asked Jeremy if Oppenheimer has now made you out of reach. Are you going to appear in his upcoming A24 thriller titled October?<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m not in his next one. The Oppenheimer effect was that I was literally working on Oppenheimer at the time [of Rebel Ridge]. Jeremy\u2019s movie started and stopped a couple of times, and there was a moment where he was like, \u201cCan you come and play this part?\u201d But I couldn\u2019t because I was literally working on Oppenheimer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tI would drop everything and pay money to be in Jeremy\u2019s movies. So it\u2019s not at all a matter of me being beyond them, but I\u2019m not going to be in his new one. I\u2019m going to be working on my own movie that\u2019s going to be shooting at the same time. We still talk all the time, we still have a company together and we\u2019re still brothers. So at some point we\u2019ll do something together again, but probably not October.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tPost-Blue Ruin, if somebody told you that you\u2019d be too busy to be in one of Jeremy\u2019s movies, would you have scoffed at such a notion?<\/p>\n

\n\tYes, I would\u2019ve scoffed. It would\u2019ve seemed unlikely. We joke about trying to get our schedules figured out so that we can be more together. We joke about trying to get our schedules in sync that way, but so far we haven\u2019t been able to do it. If you\u2019re able to get a movie up and running, it\u2019s so precarious that you can\u2019t just pause production for six months. When it\u2019s ready to go, you have to pounce on the opportunity, and that\u2019s what happened here.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMacon Blair as Dwight in Jeremy Saulnier<\/a>\u2018s Blue Ruin<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Radius TWC<\/p>\n

\n\tLastly, I have a very specific Blue Ruin question for you. At the end, Dwight (Blair) tells William (David W. Thompson) to wipe the gun and leave it behind. But we later see a shot of William tossing the gun without wiping it. Do you think he eventually got picked up and charged?<\/p>\n

\n\tWow! This is the first time I\u2019ve ever heard that question, and I\u2019ve never considered it. But since you ask, no, I don\u2019t. The reason why is because, for me, what makes the ending impactful is that Dwight gave his life in order to end that cycle of violence. And if William did get arrested and he spent the rest of his life in jail, then it would make what Dwight did meaningless to some degree. His whole thing was to try and help that innocent kid get out of this situation. So I like to think from a hopeful point of view that, palm or fingerprints on the weapon aside, it was able to happen.<\/p>\n

\n\t***
The Toxic Avenger is now playing in movie theaters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Macon Blair has had a charmed run since 2013\u2019s Cannes Film Festival.\u00a0 That\u2019s when he and childhood best…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":119741,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[77026,88,77027,77028,66116,76136,76137,77029,57581],"class_list":["post-119740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-blue-ruin","tag-entertainment","tag-green-room","tag-i-dont-feel-at-home-in-this-world-anymore","tag-jeremy-saulnier","tag-macon-blair","tag-peter-dinklage","tag-rebel-ridge","tag-the-toxic-avenger"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}