Is there hope for Mad Max fans that the story of Max Rockatansky is not quite over yet, as it seems that creator and director of the franchise, George Miller, who is now well into his 80s, is trying to get a new movie and a possible TV series made.
Via scooper Jeff Sneider: “George Miller was just in town shopping for one last Mad Max movie, and possibly a TV series, before he plans to sell the IP to the highest bidder. Warner Bros has passed on the new Mad Max movie, though Sony, Universal, and Amazon are in the mix.”
While it’s unclear what exactly these projects are, if you’ve been paying attention to the Mad Max story over the years, you can probably make an educated guess.
George Miller discusses the future of Mad Max as first looks at Chris Hemsworth in Furiosa appear
So, after Mel Gibson portrayed Max in the franchise’s first three movies – Mad Max (1979). Mad Max: The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) – Tom Hardy stepped into the role in the highly acclaimed Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015 and shortly after, a spinoff was announced to focus on Charlise Theron’s Furiosa from that movie but then came pay disputes between Miller and Warners and then covid and eventually when Furiosa came out in 2024, it starred Anya Taylor-Joy and sadly, it failed to set the box office on fire, to the point where it seemed that the Mad Max franchise was dead.
However, when it came out, Miller spoke about further plans for the series, including a movie that Miller and his team mapped out to chronicle the period between Fury Road and Furiosa. At the time, he said: “As we get towards the end of [Furiosa], the chronology, basically, we had to see that Mad Max was lurking around somewhere because we do know what happened. The writers know what happened to Mad Max in that year before, and we have a whole story of that, which I would like to do sometime if I get the chance.”
So it’s a good bet that this is the movie Miller is shopping around Hollywood.
George Miller says he’s working on next Mad Max movie and talks possibility of Mel Gibson return
As for the TV series, well, Miller had long been developing a new Mad Max tale called The Wasteland, that was so expansive it was later redeveloped as a TV series, in fact, just at the beginning of this year, I reported that ‘Warners have brought in Nitram writer Shaun Grant to develop Miller’s story as a TV series – given that it’s WB, it’s likely to be for HBO’. As for the story of The Wasteland, there’s not much known but it is reportedly a story set between Beyond Thunderdome and Fury Road, so for fans, it would be highly anticipated.
I feel that it should be mentioned that, over the years, fans of the franchise have often talked about an ‘Old Man Max’ movie that would hopefully see Gibson return as the older version of Max, at the end of his road, so to speak. It’s a trait that has become popular in recent years in movies like Blade Runner 2049 and even Star Wars: The Force Awakens and in comics such as Wolverine: Old Man Logan and Big Trouble in Little China: Old Man Jack, but while the idea is a very fun one, Miller has previously said that, to him, Max’s stories are all told with the character in his prime.
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“There’s no story that I have that has an older character, like, y’know, a Harrison Ford, or so on,” Miller says, obviously talking about Ford’s return as Rick Deckard in Blade Runner 2049, Han Solo in The Force Awakens and Indiana Jones in Dial of Destiny.
“It’s not… it happened even on Fury Road. At a certain point, it’s not like an Unforgiven, or one of those movies, where it’s really an old, burnt-out person coming back one more time.
“It’s very much… I mean, there probably are stories to tell [but] I don’t know what happens to Max when he gets into his 60s, or something like that. I haven’t even thought of that. I’m much more thinking of the characters around the time, about 40 or 50 years after the whole, sort of, collapse of society.”
So, Miller is trying to get the last two stories of Mad Max, that he has in his head, made, with the idea also being to give the character a future on the big and small screen, even if it means going to a new home? I fully support this idea and as long as whoever takes it on keeps true to Miller’s vision of a world lost to chaos, then I think there will always be an audience that outlive Miller, Gibson, and even Hardy, but never Max.
Thoughts? I know you have them and I wanna hear ’em all.
Source: Puck News
Marc
Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….
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