Furiosa director planning another Mad Max movie, but bad box office makes that tricky

This past weekend, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga opened in theaters, and it distinguished itself in two ways: 1) critics fawned over it, hailing director George Miller's return to the post-apocalyptic demolition derby that is the Mad Max franchise, and; 2) Furiosa just barely made more at the box office than The Garfield Movie, which adds up to the worst Memorial Day weekend for movie theaters in decades (excluding the peak of the COVID pandemic in 2020, when theaters were basically shut down).

Furiosa made around $64 million worldwide on a budget of $168 million, so it may be on its way to becoming a flop. And that's a shame, because the movie — a prequel exploring the origins of Imperator Furiosa, a character first introduced in 2015's Fury Road — is pretty good. But post-COVID, it's hard to predict what takes off at the movie theater, especially when there's so much we can stream at home.

Whether this foretells the death of the movie theater is a question we'll answer at a later time. Does it foretell the death of the Mad Max saga? If so, it's had a good run. Speaking to USA Today, director George Miller said he "never could imagine" that he'd still be making these movies when he was filming the first one back in the 1970s. "We couldn't afford to close streets or rent buildings or hire extras in the first movie, so we had to shift the setting from modern day Melbourne to the future, and shot in abandoned buildings and out in the desert," he laughed. "But that allowed us to be allegorical and universal, and it was born solely out of necessity. That was a happy accident."

Furiosa is unique among Mad Max movies because it doesn't actually feature Max, played by Mel Gibson in the first three movies and Tom Hardy in Fury Road. At 79 years old, Miller appears to have plenty of gas left in the tank when it comes to ideas for more movies. "In terms of where we are going, there’s this account of Max in the year before we meet him in Fury Road, which we still have," he said. "I don’t want to jinx it, but it’s the story we call Max in the Wasteland, and it looks at what forges him as a character. If the planets align, I'd love to do it."

Furiosa's run in theaters isn't over, but after this opening weekend, I have to think that we have but a slim chance of the planets aligning, at least if we're hoping to see another Mad Max movie on the big screen. Maybe on Netflix?

But again, that's a question for another day. For now, Furiosa is still tearing it up in cinemas, and Miller has promised that a black-and-white version is on the way. Miller also included a black-and-white version of Fury Road in the home video release, so this is something of a passion project for him.

"I call it 'Tinted Black & Chrome,' or I want to call it Tinted Black & Chrome," Miller said. "I must say, it’s really interesting. I’m still trying to demystify why the black and white, for me, has something more elemental to it. I still can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s not because they look like old black-and-white movies, it’s something else. It’s like if we took a picture of ourselves right now, it might look a little more dramatic if it was black and white.”

The more ways we can watch Mad Max movies, the better.

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