In news that’s sure to make Mad Max fans worldwide furious, Furiosa – the prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road – has been delayed a year. According to Variety, Warner Bros has moved its release back June 23, 2023, to May, 2024. No official reason has been given for the action movie’s delay.
George Miller, the writer-director behind the Mad Max franchise, has been trying to get a Furiosa spin-off in gear since 2016 and has been teasing her spin-off for years now. “Her backstory is pretty interesting. We only allude to it in [Fury Road],” Miller told Entertainment weekly in 2017. “You have a sense of her having gone through stuff. That’s what the movie is trying to do. You know, you’re trying to put a lot of iceberg under the tip, I like saying.”
When it was announced earlier this year that Anya Taylor-Joy had been cast as a young Furiosa, replacing Charlize Theron, fans finally had some hope that wheels were in motion, but it looks like things have stalled again.
Still, it’s not all bad news, the adventure movie is still getting a release, and this will give Miller more time to work on that all-important script. Let’s not forget that it took Miller years to get Fury Road made, and that movie turned out to be sensational. While it opened to a middling box office, Fury Road was a critical darling, garnering praise from critics around the world, reigniting interest in the Mad Max franchise, and earning a truckload of award nominations.
Plot details for Furiosa are being kept more secret than the location of the Green place, but we know that the MCU’s Chris Hemsworth and Matrix 4 star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II will star alongside Taylor-Joy. Miller has promised that the thriller movie will be structured very differently from Fury Road.
“Whereas Fury Road essentially happened over three days and two nights, this happens over many years,” Miller told The Sydney Morning Herald. “You try to make films that are ‘uniquely familiar…’ This will be familiar to those people who know Mad Max, and in particular Fury Road, but also it will be unique.”
The movie is thought to be incredibly ambitious in scale as well. Gladys Berejiklian, the current premier of New South Wales, has claimed Furiosa will be “the largest film ever to be filmed” in the state, which gives us a tantalising hint about the scale of the project. Could it be bigger and better than Fury Road? Only time will tell…