George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga failed to light up the 2024 summer box office, and will end its theatrical run at a best-case $170 million, give or take a couple of million bucks. Which is a shame, because it’s an amazing film in a franchise with so much to love. Here are my mini-reviews for all five films in the Mad Max franchise.
Anya Taylor-Joy stars in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.”
‘Mad Max’ Inspires Decades Of Genre… And Clothing
Before I dive in, it’s worth taking a moment to note how influential Mad Max has been not only on cinema, but in pop culture and fashion.
Mad Max popularized and largely created the concept of a post-apocalyptic wasteland with roaming gangs of heavily armed heavy-metal/punk/S&M stylized villains who terrorize survivors and steal the few precious remaining resources. It’s really an extension of the western genre and its concept of the lone gunfighter roaming the plains, encountering small towns brutalized by gangs of outlaws.
And in the 1970s era of gas shortages and nuclear fears, the latter which continued and worsened into the 1980s, Mad Max and its sequel Mad Max: The Road Warrior rung a bell that’s been resonating ever since through sci-fi and post-apocalyptic storytelling in film, TV, literature, music, and gaming. You can see its influences in both the popular Fallout game series and the successful Amazon Prime series adapting it in glorious fashion, or in the comedy series Our Flag Means Death in which Taika Waititi’s Blackbeard wears the same outfit Max wears in the sci-fi films.
The Road Warrior turned Max from a cop forced to resort to any means necessary to stop marauders and protect or avenge his family, into a lone gunslinger in Western style, wandering from town to town just surviving but inevitably drawn into some heroic rescue that revives the good part of him that he’s suppressed for so long.
‘Mad Max’ Movie Ranked
My “rules” were simple, I considered the film on its own merits and context, then I consider it as “objectively” as I can against the rest of the films in terms of all-around technical quality as well as entertainment value.
Lastly, this is of course my own personal opinion as always, so my tastes and interpretations and preferences all have various degrees of sway, no matter how much I do try to judge technical qualities on some sort of objective scale (again, both in context of the film’s context during production and release, as well as just side-by-side against the other films).
So without further ado, let’s get to the rankings of all five Mad Max movies, from “worst” to “best” — and as always, I use to the term “worst” loosely and just as the common-use way to frame such a list, since in this case I like or love all of the film to different degrees…
5. Mad Max — Some may consider it sacrilege to put the first film at the bottom of the list. But as good as it is, and as much credit as it gets for some of the foundational elements of the franchise and longterm impacts, there’s still no denying its rough spots and technical limitations. And crucially, its dystopian world hadn’t taken full shape as the true Wasteland that came to define the series.
4. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome — The third film in the series gained more mainstream popularity by adding pop star Tina Turner (and her hit songs “One of the Living” and “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” which are still bangers all these years later) and setting most of the story in Bartertown, where cage matches to the death are the main attraction.
3. Mad Max: The Road Warrior — Probably the most important movie in the saga, because this is where Miller figured out who his (anti-) hero really was and what his world was going to be, and established the fanbase that would propel the series forward from now on. It also established those pop culture influences discussed earlier, with aesthetics around bikers, S&M, heavy metal, and endless desert roads.
2. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga — When a series reaches a defining moment that leads us to ask “how can they top that?” it’s rare for a sequel to live up to such anticipation, and even more rare to deliver yet another defining moment. Here, the perfection of Fury Road resulted in a prequel taking the series in a new direction yet maintaining the brilliance of that previous film and showing us the possibilities it still holds.
1. Mad Max: Fury Road — The film that turned the franchise corner from low-budget genre entertainment to Best Picture nominee, and represented a major shift in Miller’s filmmaking style and quality. Everything the franchise is about, everything it has to say, and all of its best potential is wrapped up perfectly in Fury Road as the definitive Mad Max movie. It’s also probably the single greatest example of film editing in the history of cinema.
Mad Max’s Future On The Big Screen
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga grossed a disappointing $173 million worldwide, during those early weeks of summer when it looked like the spring box office successes might overshadow summer’s would-be blockbusters. It was Memorial Day weekend, and so far the only May release that had any momentum was Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
By its second weekend, Furiosa was passed by Garfield, and the following weekend when Bad Boys: Ride or Die raced into multiplexes, Furiosa had already fallen out of the top-5. But the latest film in the Mad Max saga deserved better, and I hope it becomes a major cult hit on home entertainment as more people discover it and realize what they missed out on.
Miller and the studio originally planned to move ahead with Mad Max: The Wasteland, a prequel to Fury Road showing Max’s travels and experiences leading up to Fury Road (the same storytelling approach used in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga). Sadly, word isn’t encouraging on that front, and it sounds like the financial failure of Furiosa probably ended — at least in the short-term — plans for The Wasteland as a feature film.
Perhaps Miller can be persuaded to consider a Furiosa spinoff prestige series for HBO, where the budget goes further and can tell a bigger story set in the aftermath of Fury Road. There’s also tremendous potential for a spinoff anime series, or perhaps two (maybe one for Furiosa and one for Max, and then their stories could eventually converge and cross over). Charlize Theron and Anya Taylor-Joy both did fabulous jobs as Furiosa in different stages of her life in Fury Road and Furiosa, respectively, that it would be crazy not to bring them back for more.
Miller might wind up busy, however, now that James Gunn’s DCU is about to launch and his excellent Superman trailer generated enormous interest and viewership, as Warner’s single-day most-viewed trailer of all time, with 250 million views.
I personally suspect Gunn and his DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran have George Miller’s name on a short-list of filmmakers to approach about certain projects (or just to see if there’s any DC project they have in mind), and I can easily imagine him helming something like The Authority for example, of not a Justice League movie (since Miller previously put together Warner’s canceled-at-the-last-minute Justice League movie back in 2008).
But that’s obviously speculation, and if given a choice between another attempted DC project or a chance to continue telling his original stories, Miller just might prefer to stick to the latter anyway, if the choice were offered.
Mad Max is one of the few franchises that starts out good, but then just keeps generally getting better until it breaks out into brilliance, constantly re-inventing itself in each film while still retaining whatever worked best and finding ways to improve upon it. Doing this in such a relatively simple — and, let’s be honest, somewhat repetitive in broad terms — series of stories is all the more inspiring.
