Let George Miller Finish His Mad Max Saga
Fury Road should be enough to let George Miller make anything, even a television show.
For lovers of cinema, few things are as depressing as a franchise that extends itself into too many sequels or, worse, into a television series. One need not look far into the history of genre cinema to see later entries that devolve into self-parody, and the MCU Disney+ shows have shown that too much of a good thing can dilute the power of the original property.
But such mundane rules don’t apply to George Miller. So if he wants to make one more Mad Max movie and a Mad Max TV show, as Matthew Belloni suggests in his latest rumor newsletter, then he should absolutely get the chance to do it. Because George Miller has always beat the odds, especially where Mad Max is concerned.
The original Mad Max movie from 1979 came out of the Australian New Wave, a renewed period of creativity that also launched the careers of Peter Weir and Gillian Armstrong. A small, gritty tale about a policeman standing off against a biker gang in the new future, Mad Max was a hit in Australia and gained attention in the United States. That was even more true of the 1981 sequel Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, which was a global hit, despite the inclusion of incredibly weird characters like Lord Humungus and the Feral Kid.
The surest sign that rules don’t apply to George Miller came in 2015, when the then 70-year-old director released Mad Max: Fury Road. Despite being in development for decades, despite the thirty-year-gap between this and the previous installment, despite the recasting of the main character, Fury Road was a sensation. It was both a box office hit at the time and remains in conversations about the greatest action films ever made.
Even outside of those mainline movies, Miller has an untouchable record, creatively if not always financially. He produced and co-wrote Babe and made Happy Feet, both incredibly successful children’s films, and earned an Academy Award nomination for Lorenzo’s Oil. Babe: Pig in the City didn’t win over audiences like its predecessors, but many consider it a weird classic today. Likewise, his Fury Road follow-ups Three Thousand Years of Longing and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga may not have been what people initially wanted, but they’re both interesting in surprising ways, and their reputations will only grow.
Clearly, Miller works on a different level than most filmmakers. That doesn’t mean we don’t have some concerns. Part of Fury Road‘s power comes from its intense pace and massive scale. It feels like something that can only exist on the big screen. Shrinking it and cutting it up for streaming TV feels like a sacrilege. Can Max be just as mad in smaller, bite-size forms?
If anyone can answer that question, it’s George Miller. And his answer will probably be wildly different, and wildly more exciting than anything we had in mind.