This has been a very good week for George Miller. After a 30-year wait and a famously troubled production, his Mad Max: Fury Road received near universal critical praise, plus a solid $44M debut at the box office. That's not a bad start for the awesome R-rated flick, and given the strong reviews it's likely to perform very well over the coming weeks. But that kind of acclaim means people desperately want a sequel, Lord knows I do, and Miller has been quite vocal that more is on the way.
Miller appeared on Jeff Goldsmiths' podcast and revealed the title of the next film as Mad Max: The Wasteland, even going so far as to offer a small update on the progress of any follow-ups...
“We’ve got one screenplay and a novella. It happened because with the delays [on Fury Road] and writing all the backstories, they just expanded.”
He's not kidding when talking about delays, either. 'Fury Road' was completed only a few short weeks before it opened, and chances are he'll take some time to relax before figuring out the next movie. Presumably Tom Hardy would return for the title role again, and maybe this next film will put more focus on him than on Charlize Theron's Furiosa. She has been non-commital about a return due to the grueling three-year shoot, but also because of on-set squabbles with Hardy and Miller. She told Esquire recently...
“We fuckin’ went at it, yeah. And on other days, he and George [Miller, the director] went at it. It was the isolation, and the fact that we were stuck in a rig for the entire shoot. We shot a war movie on a moving truck — there’s very little green screen. It was like a family road trip that just never went anywhere. We never got anywhere. We just drove. We drove into nothingness, and that was maddening sometimes. And it’s material that’s really frightening — we didn’t have a script. Tom and I are actors who take our jobs seriously. Both of us want to please the directors we work with, and when you don’t know if you can deliver on that, it’s a frightening place to be — and for Tom more than me, because he was stepping into big shoes.”
So we'll see about Theron coming back. It would be a huge loss if she doesn't because Furiosa totally kicked ass.
