Yesterday, Warner Bros. kicked off CinemaCon 2024 in Las Vegas with the first big studio panel, igniting a wave of excitement among fans of the “Mad Max” franchise. Visionary filmmaker George Miller’s ‘Furisoa: A Mad Max Saga’ was a highlight of the event as the film’s backstory of our wasteland heroine unfolds over 20 years. During the panel, the Aussie writer/director teased the audience with hints of a potential third Mad Max story taking place a year before “Mad Max: Fury Road” in the form of a novella he had penned during the extended production delays on the 2015 epic alongside the “Furiosa” script.
A backstory story exists about Max one year before the events of “Fury Road,” he explained.
“In order to tell the story of ‘Fury Road,’ which happens over a short period of time, three days and two nights, [we had] a lot of exposition to get through. We had to understand everything about what we see on the screen. Not only the backstory of every character, but every prop, every vehicle, every gesture,” Miller told the CinemaCon crowd (via THR). “We wrote the story of Furiosa in the 15 or 16 years of her life before we meet her in ‘Fury Road.’ We wrote a story about Max in the year before he got there, and so much else who the Immortan Joe was and so on. One was a screenplay, ‘Furiosa,’ and the other was a novella.”
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Miller’s Mad Max universe is a rich tapestry of stories, each one more intriguing than the last. While the filmmaker didn’t reveal details about the novella, in “Fury Road,” we saw Max haunted by various ghosts from his past, including Glory The Chid (played by Coco Jack Gillies). This young girl was explored in both a spinoff comic book and video game that involved the Buzzards, Gastown, The Sunken City, and Glory’s mother, Hope. While it’s unclear if a third film could explore that territory, Miller’s world is an endless fairytale, and plenty of stories are to be told within this setting.
Discussing the casting of Furiosa, Miller shared his insights on actress Anya Taylor-Joy and her intriguing connection with Theron. “There’s something mystical about her, and yet, there’s an accessibility,” he explained. “I learned that she was somebody who is very, very disciplined, even though she’s very young. [Charlize Theron] was a ballet dancer. I understand the physical discipline as well as the emotional discipline they have. So all of that led to Anya being in ‘Furiosa.’
Miller also detailed why Chris Hemsworth was cast as the film’s villain, Dementus. “I never thought of Chris until we met and we talked, and I realized he was somebody with a lot more dimensions to him than I had initially thought,” he said. “I mean, for me, he is, as they say in Australia, the complete article.”
“Furiosa” will be released exclusively in theaters on May 24 as audiences will experience the heroine’s journey from The Green Place of Many Mothers to her uneasy alliance with The Citadel. We’ll see if Miller ultimately explores that Mad Max story from that novella or returns to Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa in The Citadel as she deals with the power vacuum with the warlords of Gastown and Bullet Farm now dead.