Macon Blair Frazer Harrison/Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text Macon Blair has had a charmed run since 2013's Cannes Film Festival. That's when he and childhood best friend Jeremy Saulnier turned heads with their micro-budget revenge thriller, Blue Ruin. In 2015, Saulnier directed Blair in yet another critically acclaimed thriller known as Green Room. The following year, Blair moved into the director's chair on I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, which landed the dramatic grand jury prize at 2017's Sundance Film Festival. Blair and Saulnier would then link back up for the latter's 2018 film, Hold the Dark, which counted Blair as screenwriter and actor. Related Stories Spoilers! 'Dexter: Resurrection' Victim Speaks Out: "It Was a Striking Visual I'll Remember for Some Time" TV Michael C. Hall on the 'Dexter' Confrontation He Was Always Waiting For The current decade is when the fortunes would temporarily change for the producing partners at Bonneville Pictures. In 2020, the pandemic would help turn Saulnier's latest film, Rebel Ridge, into a five-year crucible, while Blair started to assemble his reboot of Troma Entertainment's 1984 cult hit, The Toxic Avenger. The first person he thought for the title character of "Toxie" was Peter Dinklage. The pair struck up a friendship after Dinklage served on the Sundance jury that honored Blair's feature directorial debut in 2017. Their superhero splatter film about a janitor (Dinklage's Winston Gooze) who's 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 "unreleasable" due to its niche tone of black comedy and gore, a Troma trademark. Blair 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.) "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 tells The Hollywood Reporter. In January 2025, fresh off the massive success of Terrifier 3, Cineverse acquired the distribution rights for The Toxic Avenger. Blair's 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's 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't help but have some dark nights of the soul. "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," Blair admits. "But 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, 'Oh shit, it's taking a little bit longer than I would like.' But I had faith that they were going to figure it out sooner or later, and they did." During Blair's 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's role as J. Robert Oppenheimer's lawyer in Christopher Nolan's best picture-winning Oppenheimer ultimately prevented him from appearing in Rebel Ridge. But as Saulnier's producing partner, he, too, was named as part of the Netflix film's recent Emmy nomination for outstanding "television movie." "There were those [cathartic] conversations [throughout our five years' 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," Blair recalls. "But 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's going to fucking Comic-Con. This is well beyond my expectations for this movie." Due to production on his next directorial effort, Blair, as an actor, is about to miss his second consecutive Saulnier film, but he'll still be an EP on October, his friend's Halloween-set fugitive thriller for A24. "I'm going to be working on my own movie that's going to be shooting at the same time,"