The release of Furiosa, the prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, has been postponed once again to May 2024, according to the Associated Press, though a reason for the delay has not yet been specified. The movie has been fraught with trouble since the release of George Miller’s frenetic action movie in 2015, which starred Tom Hardy in the role of Aussie survivor Max Rockatansky.
For all the success enjoyed by Mad Max: Fury Road, the casual observer could quite easily believe that the franchise has since joined the movie’s dead in Valhalla. While Furiosa was written before filming wrapped on Fury Road and announced soon after, arguments about financial backing in the meanwhile have meant that the premise for the movie has spent most of the last decade gathering dust.
Nonetheless, in 2020, the Guardian website noted that Anya Taylor-Joy (Emma, The Witch), Chris Hemsworth (Thor, Cabin in the Woods), and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Candyman, Aquaman) had been cast in Fury Road’s upcoming sequel, which, as current trends demand, is likely to be a gritty origin story about Furiosa, Max’s friend and foil in George Miller’s most recent action romp.
However, in the year since this statement was made, there’s been little in terms of developments. Apart from an interview by Esquire with Tom Hardy in August, in which the Englishman revealed that he was pleased with the new direction of the storied movies, news on Mad Max has been slow to arrive – until now, of course.
What’s interesting to note is that despite being such a popular and acclaimed franchise, Mad Max has remained relatively quiet for almost all of its four-decade history.
The Wider Mad Max Franchise
Video games are usually a good place to find adaptations of popular media. In general, if nothing has been published on modern consoles, it’s almost a guarantee that some bedroom developer will have cobbled something unofficial together back in the 1980s and 1990s. Mad Max is no exception to this rule, with two video games emerging since its inception.
The accompaniment to the Fury Road movie in 2015 was mostly forgotten about, despite its stellar reviews and comparisons to the Arkham series of Batman games. A 1990 effort from Mindscape melded driving and a type of action that’s reminiscent of Metal Gear (1987) but, again, has been lost to time. It still exists, but it’s unlikely to meet with the same modern hunger as something like Kojima’s mind-bender.
Perhaps an attempt to branch out to new sectors like online casinos will prove to be more successful for the franchise. A licensed Mad Max slots game actually emerged very recently: the title’s a fairly standard five-reel experience that features the likenesses of Max, Nux, Furiosa, and Immortan Joe. The game currently appears on 888casino, which was recently ranked among the top real money online casinos in the country by uscasinos.com, alongside other notable names like Caesars and Unibet.
The wait continues for the next film installment, but luckily, the influence of the Mad Max franchise also continues to be felt by other comic book creators such as storyboard artist Steve Skroce, who’s drawn from elements of Mad Max in his series Post Americana.
Production Issues
Despite the recent delay, it appears that the previous contention between creator George Miller and production studio Warner Bros. over a $7 million bonus has finally been resolved. The latter party claimed that the director wasn’t eligible for the prize because Fury Road ran over budget.
At the time, the sequel to Fury Road had been tentatively named Wasteland. Of course, production was forced to halt while Millar and Warner Bros. went toe-to-toe in court, so there’s a possibility that we now have a slightly different movie in the works instead of the one that could have come out clinging to the coattails of Fury Road. In any case, at least things are moving again.
Mad Max: Furiosa is expected to be released sometime in 2024.
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