George Miller has revealed his plans for a second Mad Max prequel – one that will take place between the events of this year’s Furiosa and 2015’s Fury Road.
Mere weeks before Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga rolls noisily into cinemas, director George Miller has revealed his plans for another prequel. This one, he says, will take place after his latest film but shortly before the events of 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.
The idea for the second prequel emerged in a similar way to Furiosa: while making Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller and his collaborators wrote up backstories for all his characters in order to help his actors get into their roles; those backstories in turn eventually led to the screenplay for Furiosa.
The untitled prequel hasn’t been turned into a script yet, Miller says in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, but indicates that work on it could begin soon.
“In doing what we did in the preparation of Mad Max: Fury Road, we also wrote what happened to Max in the year before we encounter him in [that film],” Miller said. “And 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.”
Miller then added, “We are certainly working on it… we wrote that basically as a novella, and now we’ve got a chance, we will get that into a screenplay form, and then we take it from there.”
The filmmaker has previously said that “Max is there lurking in the background” of Furiosa, though hasn’t revealed whether Tom Hardy, who played Max in Fury Road, will make a cameo in that movie. It certainly sounds as though Max will play a more central role in this second prequel, though whether it happens will undoubtedly hinge on the reception to Furiosa.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is out in UK cinemas on 24th May 2024.
