Is Mad Max: Fury Road a reboot or a sequel? Director George Miller offers an elegant solution to the franchise’s continuity debate. Released 30 years after the previous Mad Max film, Fury Road hit like a freight-train, proving Miller’s ongoing genius and re-introducing the title character for a modern audience. Despite its seemingly obvious appeal, the movie went through a long period in development hell; it was initially envisioned as a more direct sequel to the previous films before a number of story changes (and the passing of time) led to Mel Gibson — Max in the original trilogy — being re-cast, with Tom Hardy taking the role in his stead. The choice to recast Gibson for Fury Road, however, has some implications for the movie's continuity within the franchise as a whole.
Released in 1979, the original Mad Max is now an Australian classic — shot on a shoe-string budget, with practical car stunts and a grindhouse aesthetic. While the Wasteland setting has become a defining element of the Mad Max franchise, the original takes place in a kind of pre-apocalypse, with Max, a police officer, going rogue after his family is murdered by a biker gang. The sequel, Mad Max: The Road Warrior, is probably the best of the original trilogy, establishing the Wasteland and broadening Max’s motivations, from a quest of vengeance to one of social justice. This continued in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, with Max leading a child army to rebel against a tyrant — played (in a stroke of absurd, casting genius) by the great Tina Turner.
The Mad Max franchise has always upheld a very loose continuity, with few recurring elements aside from the title character, the Wasteland setting, and rebellion-themed narratives. In an interview with Den of Geek, Miller offered his views on the continuity debate:
“they’re not really connected in any very strict way. They’re another episode in a saga of a character who is pretty archetypal: the wanderer in the wasteland, basically searching for meaning. This is someone we see in the classic westerns, in samurai stories. You can’t really put a chronology [of the Mad Max films] together. They were never conceived that way. After I made the first one I had no intention to make a second, the second was ultimately an attempt to do the things I couldn’t in the first one and so on. They were all standalone films in many, many ways.”
When asked whether this was akin to folklore, Miller replied, “Precisely.”
This mythic approach to storytelling is very refreshing in an age of continuity-heavy franchises, allowing Miller and his team to tell the best story possible without worrying about where the events fit in a rigid Mad Max timeline or a wider narrative context. As a result, the series can be viewed out of order — no run-up required — which increases its accessibility tenfold. As fans of any large franchise will know, continuity resets are very common because, at a certain point, maintaining a consistent canon becomes a box-ticking exercise as opposed to a creative pursuit.
This can be seen every other year in both DC and Marvel comics, where an in-canon event resets the universe, often returning characters to their ‘classic’ iterations and allowing new readers the chance to keep up. TV-wise, Doctor Who does the exact same thing, because otherwise alien invasions would be seen as a common Earthly occurrence — removing a lot of the show’s relatability. Thankfully, some franchises have realized the potential of telling more stand-alone stories, with Joker, Logan, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse being the most notable recent examples. Like Mad Max, these films utilize familiar elements from their respective source material, while not being beholden to established continuity.
With the first Mad Max spin-off, Furiosa, currently in the works, will George Miller continue his folkloric approach? Furiosa, the title character, was played brilliantly by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road, but — like Mel Gibson — will be re-cast, with Anya Taylor-Joy rumored to take her place. This change in perspective should open the series up to new storytelling possibilities, and offer a fresh pair of eyes through which to view the iconic Wasteland.