'Toxic Avenger' Reboot Casts Kevin Bacon As Villain To Battle Peter Dinklage

Kevin Bacon is about to get his hands dirty.

The Tremors and Footloose star has been cast in Legendary's The Toxic Avenger, a reboot of the ultra-low-budget franchise that began with a 1984 film that inexplicably spawned multiple sequels, an animated series, a comic, and a stage musical. Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) has already been cast in the lead role, and Bacon will be playing the villain.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Bacon has been hired "to play a slick (and likely over the top) villain" in the new movie, which will be written and directed by Macon Blair, the filmmaker behind the underseen Netflix gem I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore. Unfortunately, that's all the information we have about Bacon's character at the moment, but the "slick" descriptor makes me wonder if the actor might be playing a version of Mayor Belgoody, the secret leader of the town's crime ring in the original film.

At this point it's still a little hazy exactly how much this new movie will serve as a pure reboot compared to a remake, but either way, I can easily see Bacon as a charismatic politician who uses his position of power to line his own pockets. He previously played villains in superhero-related movies before, appearing in James Gunn's Super (Gunn started his career working at Troma, the company that produced the original Toxic Avenger) and 2011's X-Men: First Class.

THR says The Toxic Avenger follows "a struggling everyman who, when pushed into a vat of toxic waste, 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." Mitch Cohen played the title character in the first film, which was a trashy little B-movie that has earned cult classic status over the years.

Hollywood has been trying to jumpstart this franchise for more than 10 years now, with people like Akiva Goldsman, Hot Tub Time Machine director Steve Pink, John Travolta, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sausage Party director Conrad Vernon, and Kevin Smith attached at various points since 2010.

Dinklage will play the lead role in the reboot, with Jacob Tremblay (Good Boys, Room) and Taylour Paige (Zola, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom) rounding out the rest of the current cast. Production is set to begin later this month in Bulgaria. Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz, who directed the original movie for Troma Entertainment, are on board this version as producers.