Peter Dinklage Is The New 'Toxic Avenger' In Legendary's Upcoming Reboot

Peter Dinklage is the new Toxic Avenger. The Game of Thrones star has signed onto his next big project: a Legendary-produced remake of the cult classic exploitation movie The Toxic Avenger, which Macon Blair (I Don't Feel At Home in This World Anymore) is set to direct.

Deadline reports that Peter Dinklage has been tapped by Legendary Pictures to star in a reboot of The Toxic Avenger, a "contemporary reimagining" of Troma Entertainment's 1984 B-movie cult comedy hit.

Per Deadline, The Toxic Avenger reboot will be "steeped in environmental themes and subverts the superhero genre in the vein of Deadpool. When a struggling everyman is pushed into a vat of toxic waste, he is transformed into a mutant freak who must go from shunned outcast to underdog hero as he races to save his son, his friends and his community from the forces of corruption and greed."

Blair is set to write and direct The Toxic Avenger, following his acclaimed directorial debut I Don't Feel At Home in This World Anymore, a 2017 comedy-thriller that debuted to rave reviews at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to win the Grand Jury Prize for the U.S. Dramatic competition. Troma's Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz will also serve as producers.

It's a high-profile follow-up for Dinklage in the aftermath of Game of Thrones, which energized his career and made him a household name. The actor has taken advantage of the buzz around him, taking on roles in blockbusters like Avengers: Infinity War and X-Men: Days of Future Past, and prestigious indies like My Dinner with Hervé and the Toronto Film Festival hit I Care A Lot, which recently got picked up by Netflix. But The Toxic Avenger has all the makings of Dinklage's next big franchise role, that is, if the reboot can capture the weird magic that turned the 1984 superhero splatter movie into a cult success.

Directed by Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman, the original The Toxic Avenger was virtually ignored upon its initial release, until it became a runaway success as a midnight movie in New York City. The gory and over-the-top superhero spoof went on to have a long and successful midnight movie run, leading to sequels The Toxic Avenger Part II, The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie, and Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV. It even became a stage musical at one point, a children's cartoon TV series, and even a Marvel comic.

With Deadpool remaining big on people's mind as the prime way to spoof superhero movies, the new The Toxic Avenger will likely tone down some of the original's more grotesque elements and go for something a bit more tongue-in-cheek — which Dinklage excels at — but knowing the Hollywood fixation on R-rated superhero movies, I wouldn't be surprised if this was just as bloody and gross as the original films famously were.