George Miller Wants to Take Mad Max for One Last Glorious Ride
A franchise lives. It dies. It lives again.
George Miller has directed and co-written every one of the Mad Max movies, from the original back in 1979 to the spin-off Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga in 2024. That’s rare for a franchise as long-running as this one — heck, even Sam Raimi is letting other people make Evil Dead movies now.
But Miller’s commitment to the Mad Max universe is a big part of what makes it work. Across several decades, Miller’s vision has given the franchise a distinctive visual identity, not to mention a deep (if not always consistent) back catalog of lore. It also allows the director to continually up the ante in terms of stunt work: Miller maintains a team of stunt professionals who work with him on multiple projects, some of them for decades. That trust and experience is how you get show-stopping moments like the tanker flips in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).
And while they’ve never been financial juggernauts —even Fury Road, the most celebrated action film of the 2010s, lost money — the Mad Max movies are critical and awards favorites. (Fury Road was nominated for 10 Oscars, and won six.) But the losses keep on escalating: Furiosa reportedly lost around $120 million at the box office, up from Fury Road’s $20-$40 million deficit. So it’s not that surprising to read that Warner Bros., which distributed the first five Mad Max movies, has turned down Miller’s pitch for a sixth and final film.
That comes from entertainment journalist Matthew Belloni’s Puck (via Games Radar), which also reports that the more encouraging update is that a number of companies, including Universal, Amazon, and Sony, are interested in a new Mad Max adventure. Given the whole “losing money after years of turbulent and expensive shooting” thing, part of the problem may be how ambitious Miller’s plans are: He’s not just selling a sixth Mad Max movie, but also a TV series set in the universe.
This excess of ideas should also not come as a surprise: As Miller told Vulture in an interview last year, “I find myself with way too many stories — not only in my head, but in the form of screenplays or at least very detailed notes that are within reach of screenplays.” One of them is tentatively titled Mad Max: The Wasteland; it’s essentially a prequel to a prequel, exploring Max’s adventures in the lead-up to his capture at the beginning of Fury Road. There’s no word yet on what the TV series will be about, although Fury Road and Furiosa introduced new characters that could further expand the series’ world.
After both the sixth movie and the TV series are done, he’ll then "sell the whole property to the highest bidder," as Belloni puts it. Then, even when George Miller dies, Max Rockatansky can live again.
