As breaks in franchises go, 30 years is a pretty lengthy hiatus. The sun last went down on Mad Max three decades ago at the end of 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome. The road back to the big screen has been anything but smooth, which is the least you’d expect from the post-apocalyptic antihero, whose iconic reputation comes pre-loaded with heaps of expectation.
Not that he was ever envisaged as the face of a franchise. “After I finished the first Mad Max, I never thought I’d make a second. After I finished the second, I never thought I’d make a third,” laughs director George Miller, the driving force behind the series since its inception.
“And here I am, doomed to make Mad Max movies...
” Cursed might be a more appropriate term here, given Fury Road’s arduous production history. Not that you’d know it to look at the teaser footage unveiled on an unsuspecting audience at Comic-Con in July 2014. Six minutes of breathless vehicular destruction, with armoured buggies streaking across the desert and ghoulishly dressed futuristic tribesfolk thrashing the hell out of their cars and each other.
One thing was immediately clear: isn’t going to be quite like anything else on the blockbuster release schedule. Given how battered, shaken and dust-blasted viewers were left feeling after the SDCC showreel, Fury Road’s bumpy production history seems bruisingly apt. The concept of a ‘Mad Max 4’ has been knocking around for so long (up to a quarter of century, according to so.
