George Miller has another Mad Max movie all planned out—if Furiosa does well enough
Miller says he's waiting and seeing how the initially slow roll-out of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga will affect his plans for Mad Max: The Wasteland
If there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear from watching George Miller’s latest apocalyptic road trip, Furiosa: A Mad Max Story, it’s that the man’s imagination is always working. We’d wager, for instance, that Miller puts more work into thinking up Fucked Up Dudes to populate his movies with than many directors devote to entire films; it’s not surprising to learn that he has a whole other Mad Max movie already living in his head.
But the tantalizing prospect of Mad Max: The Wasteland, which would apparently also serve as a prequel to 2015's Fury Road, describing what Max Rockatansky got up to between answering the question “Can’t we just get Beyond Thunderdome?” in 1985 and ending up as one of Immortan Joe’s Blood Bags in 2015, does hinge on a pretty nasty hypothetical. “I’m just waiting to see the reception on Furiosa,” Miller told Josh Horowitz of Happy Sad Confused this week. “If it all lines up, then we’ll go ahead with it.”
The issue, of course, is that while Furiosa kicks ass, it has not been kicking ass at the box office, where it’s had a much slower start than Fury Road did in theaters back in its day. (And, to be clear, Fury Road didn’t do mind-blowing numbers or anything either, ultimately bringing in $380 million during its whole run—enough to more than double its budget, but not a blockbuster by any measure.) The new film, which stars Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth, the former portraying Charlize Theron’s Fury Road character, and the latter plumbing dark new depths of his “affable, over-confident idiot” persona, presided over a very slow Memorial Day at the box office, bringing in $32 million in domestic markets. In a universe where the Hollywood apparatus exists primarily to subsidize George Miller doing cool shit with cars—a better universe than this one, we would argue—that might fly, but it could potentially make The Wasteland pretty tricky to make.
As for that film, Miller didn’t say much else about his plans, but did note that it’d be closer to Furiosa in structure than the propulsive Fury Road: “It is also a saga. It’s a year-long story… Fury Road happened over three days and two nights. You could almost say that the first act, some part of the second act, and the third act mostly play in real time. Quite a different kettle of fish than Furiosa.“