Lloyd Kaufman says Toxic Avenger remake is “better than the original”

This month’s The Toxic Avenger has been a long time coming. The upcoming iteration has core origins courtesy of Legendary Pictures in 2018, with the movie wrapping production in 2021 and screening at Fantastic Fest in 2023. But for a while, it looked like it may never emerge past that due to nobody wanting to pick it up for distribution. Now, we will finally see Peter Dinklage take over the mop, and Toxic Avenger creator Lloyd Kaufman can’t wait for the reaction.

Speaking with ComicBook.com, Lloyd Kaufman admitted that a reboot of The Toxic Avenger may not have sat well with Troma die-hards but that it has been testing through the roof. “It’s a risk, because fanboys [say], ‘Oh, remakes are no good.’ I got a lot of contact from Troma fans, ‘Why are you remaking it?’ But this is better than the original. The audiences that I’ve sat with, including at festivals but also with focus groups, always in the 90s. Whether the focus groups were normal people or Troma fans, they both were up in the 90s in terms of being appreciated.”

But this year’s The Toxic Avenger may not have happened at all had Lloyd Kaufman got around to making a fifth movie himself. “We didn’t know what to do with Toxie. We had all these ideas. Do we kill him? Because we were going to do a fifth. We made four Toxic Avenger movies, Citizen Toxie is the fourth one. But we wrote Mr. Toxie Goes to Washington…Then we were thinking,, ‘We’ll kill Toxie,’ but then where do you go from there? And then we thought, ‘Maybe a big fat Toxy, it’ll be interesting.’ And then we thought about a trans Toxie, Toxette kind of thing. But luckily, the wonderful people at Legendary did a $50 million version and hired the right director and the right actors. It’s perfect. I mean, it couldn’t be more different and great…” And while we’ll probably never get that true proper fifth Toxic Avengers movie – at least directed by Lloyd Kaufman – the character (or, at least, the Peter Dinklage version) will be carried over into a graphic novel to accompany the upcoming movie.

As it stands, The Toxic Avenger – which has Lloyd Kaufman on as producer, adding to his 55+-year career – looks to be one of the most fun horror movies of the year. Our own Michael Conway gave the movie an 8/10, saying there is a lot to offer for Troma fans and that it’s “the return of a cult icon in the most gloriously disgusting way possible.”  So make sure you tell all of your scum friends to see it in theaters.

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