Although Mad Max: Fury Road unavoidably lost one of the visual elements that give the franchise its distinctive look, the upcoming prequel spinoff Furiosa will be able to rectify this issue. 2015’s long-awaited Mad Max: Fury Road turned out to be well worth the 30-year wait between movies when the sequel arrived in theaters in 2015. A propulsive and intense action movie, Mad Max: Fury Road was an effective distillation of everything that made the franchise so popular and even proved successful enough to prompt a spinoff movie in the form of 2024’s upcoming Furiosa prequel.
However, not everything about Mad Max: Fury Road was a success. The movie’s production was infamously mired with countless complications, including unexpected rainfall destroying the arid landscapes of the shoot’s original planned location. As a result, Mad Max: Fury Road was shot in Namibia, which cost the franchise its recognizable Australian locales.
Luckily, Furiosa will be able to make up for this issue. In May 2022, filming for the prequel began in the New South Wales city of Broken Hill, meaning the franchise is coming home to Australia for the first time in decades. While shooting Fury Road in Namibia gave the sequel a stunning desert setting, Furiosa returning to Australia makes much more sense since the prequel will likely flashback to the Mad Max franchise’s pre-apocalypse universe for the first time since the original 1979 movie. As such, the Anya Taylor-Joy-led Furiosa can fit with the cohesive look of the franchise’s earlier movies where Mad Max: Fury Road was able to get away with straying from this established norm.
Director George Miller’s original Mad Max is set in the future shortly before the apocalypse occurs and features far more greenery than the later sequels. While both of the movie’s next sequels were set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, it is still an Australian wasteland and there are a handful of recurring locations that give the series a consistent look. Their absence wasn’t a major problem for Mad Max: Fury Road as the sequel takes place later in the franchise, so it was no surprise to see that the desert setting of the series looked more desolate than ever in the movie.
However, since 2024's Furiosa-centric prequel looks likely to illustrate her pre-apocalypse youth (and perhaps even answer the mystery of how the Mad Max franchise’s apocalypse occurred), the movie needed Australian locations much more than Mad Max: Fury Road. Furiosa needs to take place in the same world as 1979’s Mad Max and, although many locations in the country have visibly changed enough in the intervening years, returning to Australia was the best way for the creators to ensure this. Whether the return of the Mad Max franchise’s original Australian setting will be enough to interest audiences in a Furiosa-focused prequel remains to be seen, but the movie’s production is off to a solid start thanks to this choice of shooting locations.
