The Toxic Avenger premiered at Fantastic Fest in 2023, and audiences loved it. Then… nothing. The film had trouble finding a distributor, with one report even deeming The Toxic Avenger to be “unreleasable” and “unmarketable.” However, director Macon Blair has rejected that report, saying it was an exaggeration that got out of hand.
“When I saw that headline that said it’s ‘unreleasable,’ it made it sound like it was so gross that it’s unreleasable,” Blair told THR. “And in a way, that helps gets people interested, but it’s not that f***ing movie. It’s a gentle R-rated movie. It’s not that extreme. So cutting sections out of it wouldn’t 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’t think it would’ve changed anything, really.“
He continued, “I think that ‘unreleasable’ quote was a game of telephone that got out of hand. I suspect that somebody somewhere was like, ‘It’s having a hard time getting distributed,’ and then somebody else extrapolated that it’s unreleasable or something like that. Even when that headline came out, Legendary was still in ongoing conversations with multiple places, so it wasn’t unreleasable. It took a minute, for sure, but that was an exaggeration that got out of hand.“
Blair never lost faith that the movie would be released, but he did get worried. “It breaks my heart, but you hear stories about movies like [Coyote vs. Acme or Batgirl] that get vanished, so it’s hard not to have that cross your mind a little bit,” he said. “But I knew that the folks at Legendary — specifically the executive that I was working with, Alex Garcia — 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, ‘Oh shit, it’s taking a little bit longer than I would like,’ 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.“
Cineverse ultimately saved the day, and the film is now playing in theaters, where it will be doing some good by moping up millions of real-life medical debt. You can check out a review of the film from our own Michael Conway right here.
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