Mad Max creator/genre film legend George Miller is working on a Furiosa-centric prequel to 2015’s smash hit Fury Road, but for the film to succeed it needs to ignore the lore established by the tie-in prequel comics. Released in 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road was a massive success, winning a rare combination of critical and mainstream adoration with its skillful combination of thrilling, propulsive action, and subtle social commentary.
The film cast Tom Hardy in the title role originally played by Mel Gibson, but the long-awaited installment's story focused more on Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa. A formidable heroine, Furiosa was an uncompromising rebel whom many fans hoped would earn herself a spin-off. Fury Road never made Furiosa’s missing arm the focus of her character and instead centered her fearless attitude, creating the franchise’s most compelling and well-rounded character since the titular Max himself.
However, Fury Road’s tie-in prequel comics were widely criticized for their frequent gratuitous depictions of extreme sexual violence - a tasteless addition that didn’t gel with the tone of the movie, where sexual violence was implied rather than shown. They provided an explanation of Furiosa's beef with Immortan Joe, but didn't add anything to the film's mythos beyond a lot of upsetting material that viewers had already gleaned from context. The film refused to define Max and Furiosa by their past traumas, whereas the comics dwelled on their horrific pasts in gruesome detail. While this approach did provide Max with an engaging Fury Road backstory in his standalone issue, the comics' Furiosa issue undid a lot of what made her character so enervating and exciting for audiences in the first place.
A strong and uncompromising female heroine, Furiosa became an instantly iconic figure who earned a place in the pantheon of great action cinema protagonists. As such, a prequel film that focuses on the gratuitously grim story of the prequel comics would be a terrible idea. In the Furiosa-centric prequel comic, viewers discover that the character’s hatred of Immortan Joe is motivated by multiple explicit scenes of sexual violence, all of which could be inferred by audiences and don’t need to be portrayed in detail. It's easy to guess why Immortan Joe's captives want to be freed from him in the film, and the comics add nothing of note to the existing lore.
Fortunately, Miller is set to write the Furiosa prequel and the director had little involvement in the comics (with his contributions limited to a perfunctory “Story by” credit). Miller has proven as far back as 1979’s original critically acclaimed revenge thriller Mad Max that he can handle potentially tasteless and sensationalist content with the grace and skill absent in the comics. In the franchise's first film Max's trauma was pivotal to the character's motivation, justifying Mad Max's disturbing but carefully handled material. In comparison, the prequel comic's scenes not only add nothing to the story of Fury Road but also make for some upsetting reading, taking away the already limited agency of Immortan Joe’s captive “wives” by dwelling on their worst traumas. The brood of rebels depicted in the film become tragic victims of unwarranted scenes of sexual violence and their inspiring collective revolution is absent from the comics, whose plot wallows in their bleakest hour without narrative justification. It's a good thing Miller is on board for this Mad Max spin-off, as this hopefully means Furiosa will get the involving, intense, and wholly new story that character deserves.