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He may technically be toxic, but this avenger is radically improving peoples lives offscreen. The Toxic Avenger, the schlocktacular splatterfest from the 1980s, is slashing its way out of video store purgatory this week, with a reboot starring Peter Dinklage and Kevin Baconand an innovative marketing campaign. Hybrid studio-distributor Cineverse is hyping the film by working with the nonprofit Undue Medical Debt to wipe out at least $5 million in debt for families struggling to pay their medical bills. (The grand total may end up being much more as another $1 million in debt will be shredded for every million that Toxie takes in from theaters.) Its the rare benevolent marketing gesture that will have an immediate material impact on real Americans. Earlier promotions for the glossy-scuzzy throwback flick included a collaboration with Liquid Death and the reintroduction of another long-dormant entity, Moviefones phone line. However, when the time came to put together the final push in the days before the movies August 29 release date, Cineverses marketing team had originally considered moving in a much different direction than where they ended up. We were brainstorming stunts and I was leaning toward what we were calling a mop flash with dancing janitors, Lauren McCarthy, SVP of marketing at Cineverse, tells Fast Company. That concept was rooted in the fact that Dinklages titular character starts the movie working as a janitor. (The original 1984 film, from unapologetically trashy studio Troma, also centered around a custodian.) While flash mobs have previously helped promote movies like 2018s Mamma Mia: Here We Go Againand while its quite easy to imagine gyrating janitors making some kind of a splash onlinethe idea met with a bit of hesitancy in the room. Someone on my very smart team said, Um, let’s maybe do something good for the world instead, McCarthy recalls. And when this idea came up, we pivoted right away. A good cause inspired by the character’s origin story Although the core appeal of the campy gore-forward movie is watching a mutated custodian rip bad guy limbs right out of their sockets, The Toxic Avenger has a clear thematic connection to medical debt. Early in the film, a doctor diagnoses Dinklages character, Winston Gooze, with a rare life-threatening disease. He now has somewhere between six months and a year to liveunless he can afford to pay the exorbitant cost of treatment, which the health insurance from his shady employer (played by Bacon) of course does not cover. Even before a vat of toxic sludge enters the picture, our hero is doomed by the expensive complexities of Americas healthcare system. Though the punishingly high cost of medical bills is a major concern for uninsured Americans at all times, it has figured prominently in the national conversation throughout 2025. Last December, Luigi Mangione allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, following a long struggle with chronic back pain. (Mangione has pleaded not guilty.) The grim spectacle of this assassination ultimately provoked an outpouring of American grievances with the health insurance industry at the years start. Then, just last month, a federal judge blocked a Biden-era rule from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) meant to ban medical debt from showing up in credit reports. With the topic still fresh in public discourse, Cineverse is wise to spotlight its presence in the moviewhile making a huge difference in peoples lives in the bargain. Beyond being a noble move, though, its a cost-effective marketing spend. Undue Medical Debt works by using donor money to purchase medical debt in large, bundled portfolios, and homing in on bills for those most in need. As John Oliver demonstrated in an illuminating, charitable episode of Last Week Tonight from 2016, the shady debt-buying business is structured in such a way that altruistic souls can sometimes scoop upand wipe outa strangers debt for less than half a cent on a dollar. No matter the precise terms of Cineverses arrangement with Unpaid Medical Debt, its clear the studios dollar is stretching a long wayand for a positive cause. Movie marketing as charity Plenty of movie promotions in the past have had a charitable component. To draw attention to the environmental undercurrent of 2007s Steve Carrell comedy Evan Almighty, Universal Studios teamed up with The Conservation Fund for the planting of 15,000 trees, for instance. Lucasfilm and Disney launched the Star Wars: Force for Change program in 2014, a year before the release of Episode 7: The Force Awakens, and raised $4.2 million for Unicef. And the 2020 release Buffaloed even embarked on a similar partnership with Undue Medical Debt to erase $1.5 million in bills. (Zoey Deutchs character in that film is a debt collector.) Cineverses push stands out, howver, for the scale of its generosity ($5 million in debt eliminated, and potentially much more), its timeliness, and its relevance to the films themes. Its a witty reminder that maybe the real toxicity in The Toxic Avenger is the medical debt that too many Americans accrued along the way.
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Most of my co-workers liked to ease into their workday. They stopped and chatted on their way to their office. Once there, they put down their stuff, turned around, and headed to the break room for coffee. When they finally drifted back, they checked a few news sites (why do that at home when you could do it at work?), glanced at their emailin athletic terms, they warmed up for 20 or 30 minutes. I don’t work that way, at least not effectively. My elapsed time from bed to desk is usually about 10 minutes: make the bed, brush my teeth, grab a protein bar and a glass of water, sit down, start working. That’s not because I’m Mr. Productivity. That’s because whenever I do dawdle, whenever I do let myself settle into work, I rarely manage to work very hard the rest of the day. Hit the ground running? I stay running. Hit the ground walking, though, and I rarely can do more than jog. (I know I should be better than that, but I’m not.) Turns out there’s a little science to back up how I approach the morning. According to a study just published in The Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies (h/t to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s newsletter), warming up with heavier rather than lighter weights improves overall weight training workout performance. Participants who warmed up by doing five reps at 80 percent of their 10-rep max were able to lift more weight, and perform more reps during their workouts, than people who warmed up doing 15 reps at 40 percent of their 10-rep max. For example, say you can just barely squeeze out 10 reps of 150 pounds doing bench presses. Warmup up with five 120-pound reps will result in “significantly greater total training volume” than warming up with 15 60-pound reps. Sounds counterintuitive? After all, the goal of a warmup is to get your blood flowing, get your heart pumping a little faster, to limber and loosen your muscles. A warmup is supposed to be easy, so it doesn’t negatively impact the real work to come. Nope. As you can guess by the results, the researchers determined there was no difference in overall fatigue. Harder warmups didn’t affect stamina; even though the heavy warmup group lifted more weight overall, they weren’t more exhausted at the end of their workouts. In part, that’s because of the dose-response effect: heavier weights activate more muscle tissue and more rapidly increase body temperature, both of which lead to higher levels of strength and performance. Plus, heavier warmups may change your perception, making the weight you use for working sets seem less heavy by comparison. If you warm up with 60 pounds, shifting to 150 pounds feels like a lot. If you warm up with 120 pounds, the difference doesn’t seem nearly so great. That’s what happens to me. If I tackle easier tasks first, I tend to want to stick with easy tasks; shifting to something difficult seems daunting. But if I start my day by diving right in, that builds a sense of momentum that carries me through the rest of the day. Once I check off one hard thing, I’m eager to check off another. And another. Starting my day with a productive bang creates natural momentum, and provides the boost of motivation and energy I need to move on to the next difficult task on my to-do list. Granted, working is different than working out: muscle recruitment, body temperature, and post-activation performance enhancement don’t necessarily apply to the average person’s workday. But the principle still broadly applies. Hit the ground runningespecially if you tackle the most important task on your to-do list firstand whatever you do next won’t feel so difficult. Both by comparison and because the sense of accomplishment will make you eager to tackle something else. So you can earn that feeling again. By Jeff Haden This article originally appeared on Fast Company‘s sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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Leave it to Deion Sanders to come up with an idea for the College Football Playoff that nobody has really mentioned yet: Pay the players for making the tournament, and pay them more when their teams win.If they do that, then “now it’s equality, now it’s even and every player is making the same amount of money,” the Colorado coach said.Sanders and former Alabama coach Nick Saban talked to The Associated Press as part of their unveiling of a new Aflac commercial that rolls out this week with a storyboard ripped from today’s headlines: It opens with Sanders complaining: “This game has gotten out of control. All the money. All the unpredictability.”He is talking about health insurance, of course, and the commissioner he wants to see run it isn’t Saban, but that kooky duck who wears the same powder-blue sportscoat as the two football legends.It’s an endorsement that Sanders says hits home after his recent diagnosis with bladder cancer, from which he says he is fully recovered.“I’ve been walking with my coaches over a mile” after practice, he said ahead of Friday night’s season opener against Georgia Tech.. “Exercising, lifting.”Saban will be back on the set with ESPN in his second year of “retirement” after leaving the Crimson Tide, where he won six national titles. He insists he wants to help college sports find its footing, but not via a commissioner job that was floated last year with his name coming up as the ideal fit.“I don’t want to be in that briar patch of being a commissioner, but I do want to do everything I can to make it right,” he said.He and Sanders agreed that there needs to be more structure around deals players sign. Since July 1, schools have been able to start paying up to $20.5 million each to their athletes over the next year under the House settlement alongside third-party NIL deals that have turned some players into millionaires.Saban said he believes that forgotten amidst all the hype about name, image, likeness deals deals Sanders says are a joke because “there are only three or four guys who you might know their NIL, and the rest you’re just giving money to” is what happens to the vast majority of these players after they leave school.“For years and years and years as coaches, and when we were players, we learned this, we’re trying to create value for our future,” Saban said. “That’s why we’re going to college. It’s not just to see how much money we can make while we’re in college. It’s, how does that impact your future as far as our ability to create value for ourselves?”Currently, conferences whose schools advance to the 12-team playoff receive $4 million for making the bracket, with payments increasing for every round they win.Saban said Sanders’ idea about spreading the wealth with an NFL-style playoff bonus structure for players (winners of the Super Bowl got $171,000 last year) sounded like a good idea to him. He also had no love for proposals coming out of the Big Ten that would give that league and the Southeastern Conference multiple automatic bids.“The NFC East has the Cowboys, Eagles and Giants, they have the biggest fan bases of anyone and they have to play their way in,” Saban said. “Everyone should play their way in. One year, a conference might get five teams in, another it might get three. But there’s no (scenario) in any competitive venue where you get a guaranteed playoff spot.” Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here. AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football Eddie Pells, AP National Writer
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