The world has Mad Max fever. The franchise has managed to captivate audiences worldwide since it was first introduced in 1979. The fifth installment, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, breaks tradition by serving as the franchise’s first official spinoff, but it’s very clearly meant to be a prequel to the 2015 classic Mad Max: Fury Road. These two films are interconnected, and promoted as two pieces of a whole by creator George Miller.
The tricky part, however, is how the continuity of these two films align with the original Mad Max trilogy. There’s a three decade gap between Fury Road and the third installment, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), and given the Hollywood trend of rebooting iconic franchises, fans debated whether George Miller was making a sequel or a straight-up reboot. There’s an answer, but it’s not as cut and dry as one might expect.
Mad Max: Fury Road is a “revisiting” of the franchise
The short answer to the reboot question is yes. Mad Max: Fury Road ignores the continuity of the first three films, and opts for an approach that is unique in its presentation. The technical answer, though, is no. George Miller originally planned to sync up the events of Fury Road with Mad Max, The Road Warrior (1982), and the aforementioned Thunderdome. The early version of Fury Road, conceived in the late 1980s, would have brought back original star Mel Gibson and continued the story as we knew it. The more time passed, however, the more difficult it became to maintain the continuity.
Miller went into the 2000s expecting to reunite with Gibson and make Fury Road the fourth entry, but started to rethink things around 2006. In a 2015 Q&A with Time Out Magazine, Miller said that the older Gibson got, the harder it would be to continue telling the story. He did not want to make a “final chapter” so much as a continuing adventure, in the vein of the 007 films. The director even cited the spy series as the basis for his decision:
Really, it was more that we were getting to the point where this wasn’t Unforgiven—it wasn’t about an old road warrior. So I began looking for someone to play Max, in the same way they kept on looking for new James Bonds.
The decision to recast Gibson with Tom Hardy is what allowed Miller to start from scratch, and effectively hit the reset button on Mad Max as a franchise. The director noted that the continuity between the first three films was already loose, given how little the events of a given story factors into Max’s adventures and appearance.
George Miller’s new Mad Max films emphasize continuity
Miller’s assertion that the original trilogy had loose continuity is emphasized by how much focus he’s placed on the continuity of the new Mad Max films. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Mad Max: Fury Road only make sense in tandem, with the former being effectively incomplete without the resolution of the latter. Miller is so committed to this current iteration of the franchise that he’s already begun planning out the next installment, Mad Max: The Wasteland.
The director claimed that the film would take place in the period between Furiosa and Fury Road, and see Max join forces with a young mother amidst the titular backdrop. Miller would bring back Tom Hardy as Max, further strengthening the continuity between the three films, making them a sort of self-contained trilogy within the larger franchise.
Still, the fate of Mad Max: The Wasteland depends on the box office performance of Furiosa. “I’ll definitely wait to see how this [Furiosa] goes, before we even think about it,” Miller told reporters at the film’s premiere. Furiosa underperformed during its opening weekend, but assuming Miller gets a chance to return to his signature franchise, it will explicitly connect to the story that we’ve already been told.