Mad Max Fury Road director George Miller hints there are several more Mad Max stories as yet untold, including a prequel to Fury Road with Max as the focus. Co-created by writer/ director Miller and producer Byron Kennedy, the original Mad Max (1979), starring Mel Gibson as the titular hero, became a cult classic thanks to its superb stunt work and dystopian lived in world. Miller and Gibson furthered Max's exploits with Mad Max 2/ The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). Almost three decades later, Miller would return to the story for Mad Max Fury Road (2015) with Tom Hardy replacing Gibson as Max, alongside Charlize Theron's no-nonsense Imperator Furiosa.
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Miller is currently in production on Furiosa, a prequel starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the younger version of Theron's character. The screenplay for Furiosa was written before filming had begun on Fury Road, as were larger stories for many of that films' distinct characters, including it seems, what happened to Max in the year leading up to the events depicted in Fury Road. At the beginning of that film, Max is once again alone in the wasteland with just his signature V8 Interceptor and a handful of scavenged belongings in much worse shape than the last time audiences saw him in Thunderdome. Max is by all accounts feral, much closer in look and behavior to the marauders he faced off against previously.
Speaking recently with the AV Club about his latest film 3,000 Years of Longing, Miller disclosed that he and writer Nico Lathouris had essentially written a novel covering Max's journey set in the year preceding the events of Fury Road. He went on to talk about how their work shopping of ideas for the character of Furiosa led to fleshing out many other aspects of Fury Road and in turn birthed the idea for the upcoming prequel Furiosa. Miller said:
We also wrote, not a screenplay, but almost in novel form, Nico Lathouris and I, what happened to Max in that year before, and that’s something that we’ll look at further down the track later. But in telling each other the story of Furiosa, everything in Fury Road had to be explained. In my mind, I have a backstory of the Doof Warrior, who plays the guitar. How could a blind man who all he can do is play a guitar, how does he get to survive in a wasteland where everybody is in extremis? How did he come to be there? So we wrote little stories for every character when we made Fury Road.
The hint that Max could be returning in his own prequel and that audiences would be given the opportunity to learn what exactly led him to the state of collapse seen at the beginning of Fury Road, could potentially be the most compelling story of the Mad Max saga yet. If the film goes ahead, many will wonder about its place in the timeline. A potentially bigger question could be whether Hardy returns to the role of Max. Hardy and Theron's widely reported feud during production on Fury Road caused problems on set, marking it as a tough experience for both actors, although they've since made piece publicly.
There is also the matter of the announced sequel to Fury Road (working title Mad Max: The Wasteland), which remains in the development stage as Miller works on piecing together the story. It is likely that film, essentially Mad Max 5, will see the light of day before any proposed prequel featuring Max is put into production as at this stage there is a story but essentially no script. With Furiosa still in production and set for release on May 24, 2024, it would seem that a Max focused movie set in Miller's Mad Max world remains someway off in the distance.