Repo: The Genetic Opera’s New 4K Theatrical Re-Release Is Just The Beginning

The 2000s were an amazing time to be a lover of weird musicals. It was the era of A Very Potter Musical before Darren Criss defected to Glee, and the era of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. But more than anything, it was the era of Repo.

Repo! The Genetic Opera is the kind of movie that shouldn’t have happened, a Gothic, over-the-top dystopian musical that managed to star actors from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Goodfellas, and Spy Kids, as well as Paris Hilton. The film, an adaptation of the stage show of the same name, was directed by Darren Lynn Bousman and starred Terrance Zdunich as The GraveRobber, the narrator of this sick little world. It’s been called a feature-length Evanescence video, Succession for goths, and Morbius if it were a musical, but none of these comparisons truly capture the viewing experience.

Now, this cult classic is coming to theaters with a new 4K remaster. Inverse spoke to Bousman and Zdunich about the surprising legacy of this movie, and what could come next for it — including a possible return to the stage.

Repo! opens with a comic-book style prologue that establishes the world of this sci-fi hellscape. In a dystopian future, organ failure is taking lives at an alarming rate. The only hope is to lease new organs from the megacorporation GeneCo, but if you default on your payments, then the organ keeping you alive can be repo-ed by legal assassins. At the center of it all is Rotti Largo, CEO of GeneCo, who chooses that his legacy won’t go to any of his spoiled children but instead to the young, sickly Shilo (Alexa Vega).

But you don’t watch Repo for the plot, you watch it for the vibes. Every image is gorgeously crafted, and the songs are full of the baroque largesse that could only come from a movie created during the peak of My Chemical Romance’s popularity. Every character belts out tales of surgery and secrets, and it’s all taken deathly seriously. It’s no wonder, then, that this movie has become a beloved (to some) cinematic masterpiece.

“We went on the road for on and off probably 90 days touring Repo,” Darren Lynn Bousman tells Inverse. “And one of the things that I found pretty shocking was how it's become multi-generational. You have parents who are showing it to their kids, and now their kids are showing it to their kids. It's been this thing that's been passed down.”

That wasn’t really in the game plan originally. “We were positioned to be a failure,” Bousman says. “We were positioned to come out in two theaters, and that's not what happened. We're still here. It's been 17, going on 18 years later, and we're still here. We're still in theaters. We're still having people come up to us and show us their tattoos or their costumes. We've never left, we've just gained a bigger army every year.”

And the theatrical re-release in 4K is sure to make this army larger still. “It has that Alice in Wonderland thing that I always wanted it to have that you feel like when Repo began, you're transported into another world,” Bousman says. “It just feels more immersive as a viewing experience than it ever has.”

But Bousman isn’t content with just a one-off event, and he’s already preparing for a future physical release. Filmmaker Spooky Dan is currently cutting together a collection of bonus features.

“My wife, Laura, had shot hundreds of hours while we were making it, both in the recording studio, on set, in post, on the roadshow that's never been seen,” Bousman says. “So he's cutting that together as well as new interviews where he just got through interviewing the cast now, everyone.”

After theaters and home video, there’s one last venue Bousman wants to bring Repo back to: the stage.

“We are in the process right now of unwinding the stage show rights from Lionsgate,” he reveals. “So we will get the rights back to the stage show. And I think that as we continue to grow again and basically repull in that audience, then the sky is the limit.”

One of the joys of watching Repo all these years later isn’t how well it aged but, in a strange way, how accurately it aged. “We were making a parody of the future and it's real in a way that you would think might date Repo, but in some ways it's like that's the world we live in now,” Terrance Zdunich tells Inverse. Medical debt can ruin lives, and body modifications are everywhere.

But regardless of whether or not we’re living in the dystopia it predicted, we have Repo in all of its messy, of-its-time glory to escape into. “Perhaps some of the mixing styles or the technology that was available at the time might look dated, but I don't know if that was ever the point of what we were doing,” Zdunich says. “I don't think it feels dated. I think, actually, right now it feels refreshing. Everything was hand-done. Everything was about people and getting a real reaction from a real audience. I think it still feels fresh now, even perhaps without peer, even though people can do a lot more now.”

What is possible was never the point, though.

“Repo is its own thing,” Zdunich says, “and I think that's the essence of who we are.”

Repo! The Genetic Opera is playing in theaters now.