Why compromise your vision, even if the end result is so grotesque that it can’t even garner an official MPAA rating? FilmmakerMacon Blair— also an actor from various Jeremy Saulnier movies such asBlue RuinandGreen Room— has a new film that is “unrated” but will still hit theaters, as early as this month. Interestingly, the official festival premiere ofThe Toxic Avengertook place way back in 2023, and despite critical acclaim, it’s taken almost a full two years for thePeter Dinklage-led reboot of a 1984 cult classic to getproperly distributed to North American theaters, as deservedly so. But why now? MovieWeb recently caught up with Blair himself, whose highly anticipated remake is being released by Cineverse — the same backers ofTerrifier 3, the similarly unrated horror film that won the box office one weekend last year. Blair opened up about his black comedy splatter film’s long journey to cinemas.
“I think theTerrifierthing really helped because, you know, [The Toxic Avenger] got hung up in distribution limbo for a while,” he told MovieWeb. “But over that period of time, it seems like Cineverse was very successful with theTerrifierfranchise and other things — but significantlyTerrifier. And I think that put them in a position where they could take on ‘Toxie,’ and they knew how to market… a movie that was not necessarily mainstream, and be successful in that way.”
Blair continued, calling the period of limbo faced byThe Toxic Avenger"nerve-wracking" and heaping praise on Cineverse.
“It was certainly nerve-wracking for that period of time when it was in limbo. But the silver lining is that on the other side of it, we ended up with a partner who really is able to get it in front of a lot of people in a very cool way. Like, I was not expecting it to be able to get a theatrical run, you know, for one thing. And it’s going to be in theaters. So I’m happy to wait, if that’s the result.”
Macon Blair Always Intended for ‘Toxic Avenger’ to Be Rated-R
Blair also shared with MovieWeb about his vision from the get-go, once Legendary had obtained the rights from Troma —the producers of the originalToxic Avenger— and reached out to him for a pitch:
“It wants to be rated R. It should be very silly and sweet, like, not dark and serious. And it was more of like the vibe of the original that I wanted to preserve. And that’s what I suggested to them, and they got down with that. And from there, we developed a script… I saw the original at a very young age, and it kind of made an impression on me. And I think my feeling was, like, not really so much trying to recreate the exact story necessarily, as just the feeling of watching it, which is for me, was kind of like, ‘What the f*** are they doing?’ And so that’s what I wanted to carry into this one, more so than, like, doing the same story again.”
Check out the “WTF"end result for yourself. From Cineverse, the all-newToxic Avengerhits theaters Friday, July 01, 2025.
The Toxic Avenger
