The Goriest Comedy of the Year Has Erased $15 Million in Medical Debt

2025’s unlikeliest hero is a mutant janitor who originated with the company that gave us Class of Nuke 'Em High, Cannibal! The Musical and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.

The Toxic Avenger is, of course, the ultraviolent 1984 Troma movie about a deformed, mop-wielding superhero. And it was the rare Troma release to inspire a Saturday morning cartoon show for kids.

The cult hit was recently remade by director Macon Blair, starring Peter Dinklage in the title role. But after premiering at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas back in 2023, it sat on the shelf for two years. Why? Because some distributors considered the gore-soaked satire to be “unreleasable.”

When it finally hit theaters, 2025’s Toxic Avenger unveiled an interesting promotional stunt. Since the movie is very much about the burdens of debt and the evils of America’s corporatized healthcare system, the filmmakers announced that “$5 million in medical debt” would be “erased no matter what,” thanks to distributor Cineverse’s deal with the organization Undue Medical debt. And “for every million bucks the movie makes at the box office, another million in debt will go up in toxic smoke,” Undue said in a statement. 

As their website explains, Undue uses donor money to “buy and erase the medical debts of everyday people — freeing them from the undue burden of medical bills they can’t afford.”

This all very laudable, especially since most movie PR stunts are lame and completely self-serving, as evidenced by the time the director of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea made a movie that promised to give away a million dollars in an effort to boost sales for a garbage bag company. 

In a recent interview with Yahoo!, Blair revealed that he “just thought that was the coolest fucking promo for a movie. And so on one hand, it was fun that the movie was out there, and people liked it for what it was, and then on the other hand, it was doing this tangibly positive thing. So I was pretty thrilled.”

As a result of the promotion, the Toxic Avenger ended up “wiping out US$15 million in medical debt for more than 10,000 people.”

“It put it all into perspective,” Blair continued. “When they start talking about millions of dollars of medical debt being erased for people, you’re kind of like... I don’t give a fuck what the reviews are. I’m glad they were swell, but this seems like the real, substantial thing. And so it was this great reorganization of what really felt important. And I was glad that the movie was engineering something positive in that way.”

Maybe this is just how we should promote movies from now on? 

The ball’s in your court, Avatar: Fire and Ash.