Hollywood rushes to find excuses not to make another Mad Max movie after Furiosa

This past weekend, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga opened in theaters to disappointing box office returns, making around $64 million worldwide on a budget of $168 million. It's still early in the movie's run, but it's soon enough that Hollywood industry folk are worrying that this will kill what at one point looked like a revitalized franchise.

Director George Miller has been making Mad Max movies since the 1970s. The first three movies starred Mel Gibson in the title role and made just under $70 million worldwide put together. There was no guarantee that 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road would do any better, especially after the franchise had been dormant for 30 years, but Fury Road became an instant classic, earning nearly $380 million on a budget of $150 million. That's actually not a thunderous hit by Hollywood's standards at the time — for reference, the Pixar movie Inside Out made $850 million that year — but Fury Road had an outsized cultural impact, George Miller had been well-liked in Hollywood for decades, and the movie did well enough for Warner Bros. to get behind a prequel, albeit slowly: Furiosa wouldn't come out until nine years later.

And now it looks like it may bomb at the box office. Again, its race isn't run yet, but insiders are already talking to The Hollywood Reporter trying to diagnose what went wrong. “Fury Road was an outlier in the series," said one executive. "It also had a hot young star and a huge female star. Nine years later, it had neither.”

The hot young star was Tom Hardy as Mad Max himself and the huge female star was Charlize Theron as Furiosa, who is arguably the main protagonist of the movie. Furiosa excises Max entirely and focuses on a young Furiosa, now played by Anya Taylor-Joy. Marvel veteran Chris Hemsworth plays her nemesis Dementus. I'm looking a bit askance at this explanation, because do Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth really have that much less star power than Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy did in 2015? I think that's an open question, but some studio insiders seem convinced it did the new movie in. “I think Furiosa suffered without Charlize," said one. "People who see the movie love it. The problem is getting them into theaters. She would have been able to do that."

I think there's a little more weight to the idea that Fury Road was an outlier in a franchise that usually has a more niche appeal. Fury Road wasn't just the best Mad Max movie yet produced; it was the best action movie to come along in years, and it may have gotten a boost off of that.

Still, you'd think more of the new Mad Max fans created by Fury Road would have come back for the prequel. Maybe too much time had passed, and Furiosa was only able to capture the diehard Mad Max fans who'd always loved the series. “IP like Mad Max and Ghostbusters is old, and they have the fans they’re going to have,” said one theater chain executive. “If studios can budget to that, they might make some decent money.”

Another explanation for the subpar performance is that Furiosa is: A) a prequel, something I think a lot of people have gotten tired of in an age when Hollywood can't seem to stop spinning everything off into infinity, and; B) starred a woman in the lead role, or a least a character who wasn't Max Rockatansky, the character who gives the franchise its name.

But lest we blame the movie's bad box office on a male audience's unwillingness to watch an action movie about a woman, THR has some interesting stats for us: Apparently the box office split for Fury Road's opening weekend was 60 percent male and 40 percent female. But for Furiosa, it was 71 percent male and 29 percent female. In terms of age groups, 18-24-year-olds made up about 31 percent of the audience for Fury Road but only 21 percent for Furiosa. So interest seems to have dropped across the board.

There's also the idea that people are less interested in going to the movie theater after the COVID pandemic got them used to streaming movies and shows at home, although movies like Barbie and Oppenhiemer have managed to woo them back. Lately, things at the box office have been pretty grim for movies in general, not just Furiosa. “This fever will hopefully break in June and July with an overperformance by at least one of the high-profile films to get the wind back in the sails of the box office,” says Paul Dergarabedian of Comscore. (Big upcoming movies in those months include Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine.) “Let’s see what happens next year with Mission: Impossible and in 2026 with the next Star Wars movie,” says box office analyst Eric Handler of Roth Capital.

In the meantime, unless Furiosa shifts into a higher gear, we can assume that Miller's next planned Mad Max project, a movie called Max in the Wasteland that would explore what Max was up to in the year before Fury Road, is likely a no-go. If you'd like to change that, Furiosa is playing in theaters now.

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