There are many phenomenal aspects of George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road, and certainly counted among them is the film's execution of world-building. The are no big dumps of exposition, and yet you understand how things work by seeing the characters in action. The reason it works so well can be attributed to the writer/director's passion to work it all out for himself – and he actually went so far into detail mapping it out that it resulted in the screenplay for the upcoming spinoff Furiosa.
Recently speaking with The A.V. Club about his latest film, Three Thousand Years Of Longing, George Miller was asked the challenge of taking a step backwards from the story he previously told with Mad Max: Fury Road, and the filmmaker explained why that hasn't really the case in the making of Furiosa. He knew what the lead character's story was even before embarking on the crazy production for the 2015 blockbuster, and the spinoff/prequel is just him going back to that material. Said Miller,
We never explained how she lost her arm. We never explain what the actual Green Place Of Many Mothers was. We never explained the workings of the Citadel. So we had the screenplay virtually complete before we shot Fury Road, and we did it because it arose out of wanting to explain to everybody who Furiosa was—to Charlize [Theron] when she took on the role, and to all the actors and the designers and everybody else working on the Citadel and so on.
Continuing, George Miller added that he saw the potential in what he had created with Furiosa immediately, and he thought early on that the character's story would make a good solo movie in the aftermath of Mad Max: Fury Road. In Miller's words,
The feeling was, gee, this is a pretty good screenplay, and then I kept saying to myself, 'if Fury Road works, I’d really like to tell this story.
Mad Max: Fury Road most definitely did work, and now George Miller is hard at work getting Furiosa ready for its scheduled May 24, 2024 release date. Production on the movie began back in June, and there are expectations for a wild adventure.
Because Furiosa is set years before the events depicted in Mad Max: Fury Road, Charlize Theron won't be back playing the lead role, and instead it will be The Queen's Gambit's Anya Taylor-Joy (who is prepared for a life-changing experience with the part). It's been confirmed that Chris Hemsworth will be playing the main antagonist in the movie, and it's rumored that his character will be named Warlord Dementus.
We have quite a long time to wait before Furiosa arrives on big screens around the world, but for now you can scope out our 2022 Movie Release Calendar and our 2023 Movie Release Calendar to discover all of the films that are coming out between now and our next ride in the Mad Max universe.
