Although Mad Max: Fury Road was a huge success upon its 2015 release, the sequel was almost doomed by the failure of 2011’s family film sequel Happy Feet 2. A lot of factors stood in the way of Mad Max: Fury Road’s production. Some of director George Miller’s plans, like shooting Mad Max: Fury Road in 3D, were too expensive to realize, while a lot of the sequel’s more outré elements were cut from early script drafts.
However, one of the weirdest factors that almost doomed Mad Max: Fury Road before the movie even began shooting was the failure of 2011’s family comedy sequel Happy Feet 2. The followup to 2006’s Happy Feet was a tale of a tap-dancing penguin with a surprisingly dark environmentalist message. Unfortunately, despite an all-star cast, Happy Feet 2 was a massive commercial disappointment upon its arrival in cinemas. The expensive sequel seriously shook the studio’s faith in Mad Max creator Miller, who co-wrote and directed both Happy Feet movies.
In 2011 pre-production was finally coming to a close on Mad Max: Fury Road, with Tom Hardy cast as Max, the budget finally secured, and filming permits being sought in Namibia. After over twenty-five years of development, the Mad Max sequel was finally set to become a reality when, in November of that year, Happy Feet 2 flopped at the box office. This marked the second time (after 1998’s similarly disastrous Babe: Pig In The City) that veteran helmer Miller killed a franchise with a critically-disliked sequel. As such, the occurrence raised serious questions over whether Miller's much more expensive, ambitious, and delayed Mad Max follow-up could deliver. Fortunately, Miller was undeterred and went on to win back both critical approval and massive box office success with Mad Max: Fury Road. Yet, the situation was undoubtedly perilous.
In fairness to Miller, his financial successes tell as much of a story as his flops. Miller's original Mad Max was once the most profitable movie of all time thanks to the huge amount that the release earned against a minuscule budget, proving that Miller was adept at doing a lot with a little. However, the studio’s reticence was also understandable, since Mad Max: Fury Road had gone through many more revisions than the relativity straightforward Happy Feet 2 and the franchise had been off cinema screens—and thus, out of the public’s mind—for far longer than that family comedy series.
That said, the original Happy Feet was a relatively well-liked, if unmemorable, animated movie. In contrast, the earlier Mad Max movies made a megastar of Mel Gibson (and defined his directing career), popularized an aesthetic that still defines post-apocalyptic action cinema to this day, and made hundreds of millions of dollars despite their humble beginnings as a cheap independent exploitation movie. As such, even after the financial failure of Happy Feet 2, studios knew better than to bet against George Miller and Max Rockatansky when it came to the production of Mad Max: Fury Road.