Macon Blair Could Very Well Be Hollywood’s Secret Weapon Against Superhero Fatigue

Let me first establish that I reject the premise of superhero fatigue. Enough people have bought into the idea that everyone’s sick of superhero movies to give it at least a bit of weight, but I’d lay down a fairly hefty bet that all of those people are actually just suffering from uninspired media fatigue; of course, you’ll feel sick of superhero movies if you’re watching the likes of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, or Morbius.

Indeed, at the risk of being grossly reductive, the key to solving superhero fatigue is to make superhero movies that are original and good, and judging by the meticulous way he looks to be approaching The Toxic Avenger, Macon Blair seems dead set on giving us just that.

Time will tell if it all pays off, of course, but the writer-director of the Peter Dinklage-led black comedy is showing no signs of misunderstanding the assignment, revealing in a recent interview with Collider that he quite consciously adhered to a balancing act that involved honoring the die-hard fans of the original 1984 film while also making sure that newcomers and run-of-the-mill moviegoers weren’t left in the dust.

That was absolutely the kind of tightrope, like how do we honor the fan base? Because we knew we had to make something that would appeal to them … but as you said, it’s a very devoted, vocal fan base, but of the overall movie-going population, it’s quite a small sliver. So we had to make sure they were taken care of first, and also make sure that people that had never heard of The Toxic Avenger were also gonna be taken care of.

The key to this balancing act? Fully embrace the core of The Toxic Avenger‘s R-rated, stomach-churning, groan-hungry humor, and go from there.

So for me, it was certainly the silly-on-purpose, kind of juvenile-on-purpose sense of humor, anything for a laugh, anything to sort of like tickle people’s sensibility that revolves around physical gags and gross makeup and stuff like that. We definitely wanted to preserve all of that.

As for what “go from there” entails, Blair dished on the notable departure that his film made from the 1984 original, namely in the form of reimagining the eponymous protagonist as a single, down-on-his-luck stepfather rather than following the beaten path of a high school outcast.

In the original, the main character, he was a teenage guy, and he was kind of an outcast at high school. So for this time, the character is older, he’s trying to raise a stepson, he’s trying to raise a kid on his own, and he’s just having a hard time with that. He’s not really cut out to be a dad, and he’s not really connected to this kid, and so that’s the kind of emotional story that we bury within all the mutant mayhem stuff that’s going on. So that was sort of the new thing, the new direction we tried to take it in.

Indeed, it looks like Blair has thought through just about every single solitary piece of his Toxic Avenger movie, and in a world full of formulaic-at-best and asinine-at-worst caped shenanigans, that’s exactly the sort of thing moviegoers should love to see. While it’s not yet clear when wider audiences will get to take a gander at Blair’s depraved antithesis to the superhero subgenre, we’ll all be crossing our fingers for a movie that makes good on the filmmaker’s crisp intent.

(via Collider, featured image: Legendary Pictures)