It was a simpler time, back when we thought George Miller was making another Mad Max movie; the skies seemed brighter, we all laughed easier, children seemed filled with hope. It was – yes, clear back on January 7, when the franchise director told Entertainment Weekly that while “I’m not sure if it’s the very next movie I want to do,” and he wanted to do “something a bit smaller before we go back out into the wasteland,” he did indeed plan to return to the series after he “clear[ed] the exhaust.” And that film might not even follow Max, but the other protagonist of Fury Road , Charlize Theron’s Furiosa: “Yeah, she’s a pretty compelling character so it would be great to tell her story.” Welp, turns out Mr. Miller was just yankin’ our chains.
Why the change of heart? It sounds like that he thought some more about that whole “back out into the wasteland” thing and decided to give it a pass. “I won’t make more Mad Max movies,” he told the New York Post at the Golden Globes. “If you finish one in a year, it’s considered a leap of faith. Start, stop, start again… I’ve shot in Australia in a field of wild flowers and flat red earth when it rained heavily forever. We had to wait 18 months and every return to the US was 27 hours. Those Mad Maxes take forever. I won’t do those anymore.”
The Guardian suggests Miller is probably open to letting another filmmaker (or filmmakers) take over the series, a la Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But that film followed the series’ creator running the franchise into a ditch like a drunken long-haul trucker; Miller is coming off the best one yet, so seriously, who wants to see a George Miller-less Mad Max? The whole thing is depressing and dispiriting; I’m just gonna spray myself with silver paint and crawl under my desk for a couple of days.