All 5 Mad Max movies, including Furiosa, ranked worst to best

This weekend marks the release of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the cumbersomely named fifth movie in the long-running Mad Max franchise. And I do mean long-running. The first Mad Max movie came out all the way back in 1979, when director George Miller was in his mid-30s. At the time of Furiosa's release, he's 79 years old. This man has been directing high-octane car carnage movies for nearly 50 years, and they've just gotten better over time.

Well, they've gotten different. Although the Mad Max movies tend to share things in common — they're set in post-apocalyptic Australia, they've always got at least one car chase, and a lot of people wear leather fetish gear for some reason — they each have their own distinct flavor, and some taste a bit better than others.

We're going to go through all five Mad Max movies and rank them worst to best, analyzing what makes them stand out from the pack as we go along. By the end, hopefully you'll have a better understanding of what makes this iconic action series tick.

5. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

The third Mad Max movie is the last starring Mel Gibson in the title role. The franchise would go into hibernation for a full 30 years after this, probably because it made a lot less money at the box office than its predecessors in proportion to its budget, which was the biggest for a Mad Max film yet. The first two Mad Max movies felt like smaller movies made for meager budgets tied together with duct tape and hope. Beyond Thunderdome looks more like a proper Hollywood movie, with big sets, tons of extras and superstar Tina Turner playing the villain, Aunty. This new level of gloss is both a pro and a con. The movie looks great, but it lacks some of the punk energy of the earlier films. On the other hand, the broader, jokier, slightly more family-friendly tone helps set it apart. No one movie in the series feels quite like this one.

The script has some issues. Beyond Thunderdome is divided into two halves: in the first half, Max wanders into a thriving village called Bartertown, ruled over by Turner's Aunty. He helps Aunty consolidate her rule, but is thrown out after he's unwilling to finish the dirty job she assigns him. Max drops unconscious in the desert and is found by a group of feral children who have been living in isolation ever since a plane crash years ago; they think of the world's pre-apocalypse past as a mythical golden age and treat Max as a prophet. Eventually these two plotlines collide and we get a car chase to cap things off, as one does.

Simply put, the Bartertown segments are more interesting than the kid stuff. The one-on-one fight in the Thunderdome between Max and Blaster is especially thrilling; the idea of a Thunderdome — "two men enter, one man leaves" — is used so often in popular culture that many people probably don't even realize it originated with this movie. Tina Turner is fun as a no-nonsense tyrant and Miller gets to do some literal worldbuilding as he shows us civilization coming back to the wasteland.

The Mad Max movies have always been a bit hokey and exaggerated, but the stuff with the kids goes too far even for them. The kids creating a mythology around old knick-knacks from before the world fell...it's a neat idea but hard to take seriously. The movie drags at this point. And the final car chase feels tacked on, like Miller realized he'd gone the entire movie without one and shoved it in at the last minute.

But to end on a positive, Beyond Thunderdome is the only Mad Max to produce a hit single, so that's worth something.

And now we go back to the beginning:

4. Mad Max (1979)

George Miller and company made the first Mad Max film before they knew it was going to become a franchise, and it almost feels like it's set in a different universe completely. That's in part due to the budget; Mad Max was made for $200,000, which is just under a million bucks in 2024 money. The movie actually looks terrific considering its cost; the car chase scenes look slick and a young, hunky Mel Gibson photographs wonderfully. But no one has the money to stage 30-car pileups or build junkyard cities. This movie looks looks like it was filmed on empty streets and fields in Australia, because it was.

But Mad Max was a huge hit that made back its budget hundreds of times over, because it's stylish, exciting and edgy in a way that was very exciting in the '70s, if a little old hat now. Max isn't a wandering road warrior in this one; he's a cop. And the world doesn't look like it's ending; there's just a mean biking gang terrorizing the citizens. I think the whole post-apocalyptic angle was added with the sequel, another reason the first Mad Max movie feels so distinct from the others.

Mad Max is also the only movie in the series to really treat the title character as a character. In most of the movies, Max is an anonymous wanderer who gets swept up in some new drama, or who meets someone he feels he must help. In Beyond Thunderdome, he's introduced as "the man with no name." But in Mad Max, he's a guy with a wife and a kid and friends and a personality. His arc involves him being corrupted by the lawlessness of the world, becoming as hard and merciless as the criminals he arrests. Some of the plots beats feel clichéd now, like Max's perfect beautiful wife being mowed down as a way to inspire his revenge rampage. But they became clichés because movies inspired by Mad Max ran them into the ground.

The Mad Max series isn't known for happy endings, but the ending to the first movie is especially bleak; again, they didn't know they were gonna follow it up. But it's bracing and daring, even today. And all the grimdark energy is offset by Miller's sense of whimsy, which is already visible at this early stage. Mad Max does feel its age sometimes, but it holds up.

3. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

When the Mad Max series returned following its 30-year hiatus with Fury Road, George Miller seemed to be less interested in Max himself. Fury Road was secretly a movie about a new character named Furiosa, who drives a war rig for Immortan Joe, one of the many tyrannical despots who have become powerful in the wasteland. Furiosa is a prequel all about her origins; Max shows up only for the briefest of cameos, and he doesn't say a word. Really, the Mad Max series is two series: the first three films starring Mel Gibson and these more recent two about Furiosa.

That's why I think this movie could safely lose the "A Mad Max Saga" tag. It's about Furiosa, and she's more than capable of holding a movie on her shoulders. We learn about how she was taken from her verdant homeland as a child by men working for the warlord Dementus, played with winking savagery by Chris Hemsworth. As an adult, Furiosa is played by Anya Taylor-Joy, who vibrates with barely contained fury whenever she's onscreen. We all want a confrontation between her and Dementus, and when we finally get one, it's worth the wait.

That said, we have to wait for a while. At two-and-a-half hours, Furiosa is far and away the longest movie in the series, and it still feels overstuffed. At one point, the movie skips over some important events that it just can't depict without becoming a season of TV. Some pruning, editing and shaping at the script stage could have resulted in a better paced movie.

The action scenes are, as expected, spectacular, and not just there for their own sake; the movie is just as interested in Furiosa's emotions as it is in her driving a war rig with a whirling ball and chain copter attached to the back. Furiosa makes more extensive use of CGI than earlier movies, and that does cut down on the sense of authenticity a bit, but the chase scenes will still get the blood pumping.

2. Mad Max: The Road Warrior (1981)

In a way, The Road Warrior is the real beginning of the Mad Max series. Aesthetically, this is when the franchise established the motifs it uses to this day: a post-apocalyptic desert populated with desperate people trying to eke out a living, roving gangs of lawless bikers who seem to have a fondness for fetish wear, makeshift cities cobbled out of whatever junk was left over from the fall of civilization, and vehicles that are part car, part medieval torture device. Like the term "Thunderdome," this aesthetic became so widespread that a lot of people may not realize it originates here.

And the movie achieves this look on what is still a comparatively modest budget for the time: $2 million, or just over $7 million in 2024 money. The movie retains the rebel spirit of the first film, but with a lot more polish and ambition. The result is an action classic that's still a blast to watch today.

The Road Warrior strikes a good balance with Max himself. He still has an emotional arc; despite his attempts to cut himself off from human connection, he finds himself helping a group of villagers fight back against a vicious biker gang led by a masked bodybuilder named Lord Humongous. (There's that Mad Max sense of humor at work.) But The Road Warrior also starts treating Max as more of an icon, a man from nowhere who sweeps into these peoples' lives like the hero of a Clint Eastwood western or an Akira Kurosawa samurai movie.

The script has no fat on it. Every character serves a purpose, no matter how small, the movie has an elemental simplicity to it, and the ending is genuinely surprising; it's bleak as per usual, but it's not as cruel as the ending to the first film nor as saccharine as the third. The chase scene at the end steps up the showmanship from the first movie considerably, but it also has a lot of emotional weight, as characters we've come to like put their lives at risk.

The Road Warrior is a great freaking movie. It's a miracle that anything can top it, but...

1. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

No one knew quite what to expect when George Miller returned to the Mad Max franchise after 30 years away. In the meantime, he'd become best known for family fare like Babe: Pig in the City and Happy Feet, great family movies but a million miles removed from the grit and grime of the wasteland. Did he really have another Mad Max in him?

Very much yes. The look and feel of the film is familiar: the parched earth, the death-mobiles, the legions of leather-clad S&M warriors...it's all here. But the format and story are very new for the series. Fury Road doesn't just rehash the earlier movies, it evolves them.

To start, the fact that Mad Max's name is in the title is a bit of a mislead, because while the movie starts and ends with him, he's a secondary character, and more of a no-name cipher than he's ever been. The real lead character is Imperator Furiosa (played here by Charlize Theron rather than Anya Taylor-Joy), who's rebelling against the warlord Immortan Joe by helping smuggle his harem of abused brides out of his Citadel. This conceit gives the movie a compelling hook; Joe's brides serve the same function here that the gasoline does in The Road Warrior: they're the thing that gets the plot moving, the thing everyone is fighting over. But the brides are living, breathing people we can root for and fear for. There's no space between the plot and the characters because the plot is the characters.

With the need for exposition dispensed with, Miller is free to turn Fury Road into a two-hour action scene, with Max, Furiosa, and the brides trying to outrun Immortan Joe and his hordes. Miller finds time for a personal breakdown for Furiosa and an enemies-to-lovers arc for one of Joe's disillusioned goons. And none of this distracts from the action because the whole movie is a car chase. Danger is always just out of frame, ready to flare up.

And these action scenes...Clearly the 30 years off gave Miller time to imagine how he would bring the world of Mad Max to life with modern technology. Cars getting engulfed by desert sandstorms, war boys vaulting from moving car to moving car on poles, and of course there's that one guy strapped to the front of a war rig ripping on electric guitar. It's an explosion of visual creativity, much of it done in camera in a way that makes it more fun to watch than the action scenes in Furiosa, where the CGI is more obvious.

Speaking of Furiosa comparisons, I think it feels less special than Fury Road because it flows like a normal film: there's a character scene, then a plot scene, and then an action scene, and then it repeats. In Fury Road, all of the elements occupy the same space, which gives it an immediacy no other movie in the series has.

I don't say that to dunk on Furiosa, which represents yet another new direction for the series. The Mad Max movies have never rested on their laurels, which is how they've remained relevant for 45 years. It's crazy that this independent car chase series has evolved into a genre-defining institution, and that it still feels like it has plenty of gas left in the tank.

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