If you thought Charlize Theron’s heroine Imperator Furiosa was the true main character of last year’s hit Mad Max: Fury Road instead of Tom Hardy’s gruff, titular, reluctant hero, we have some exciting news: George Miller’s Wasteland, a possible sequel (or prequel) to the post-apocalyptic demolition-derby will be all about Furiosa.
According to Aussie newspaper The Herald Sun, filming on a new Mad Max film will begin at Broken Hill Studios in New South Wales sometime before the end of this year into early 2017. Don’t get too excited. We should take this rumor with a grain of salt as pre-production on movies like this usually takes a ton of planning and doesn’t just come together in a matter of months.
But Miller has said in the past that he had two Mad Max movies planned, one was Fury Road and the other was reportedly titled Furiosa. The Sun says the new movie will be titled Mad Max: The Wasteland, which Miller said around the time Fury Road was released was actually the updated title of the sequel.
So will this just be another movie about Max Rockatansky surviving in the post-apocalyptic future? Well, maybe.
The report says the movie will focus on the backstory of Furiosa instead of Max, but also says that Tom Hardy, despite having a legendarily awful time shooting Fury Road, will be back as well. So The Wasteland kind of seems like a prequel, but maybe also a sequel.
If we’re getting a more fleshed out version of Furiosa, we hope to see what it was like for her growing up in the Green Place, the mythical location in the lore of Fury Road that was a utopia-like setting able to sustain crops and maintain a thriving population of settlers. From what we learned in Fury Road, she was apparently a descendant of the “Vuvalini of Many Mothers, the all-female tribe who lived and oversaw the Green Place, who eventually had to leave it after the soil became barren. She was kidnapped and forced into becoming a soldier under Immortan Joe, and grew into his greatest warrior ferrying oil from Gas Town to his Citadel before she joined up with Max and escaped with Joe’s Five Wives.
If Hardy does reprise his role then maybe it’ll show the fallout from Furiosa killing Joe and taking back the Citadel. It figures that not all the War Boys would be happy about Immortan Joe’s death.
While Warner Bros. and George Miller haven’t confirmed anything, it’s still worth wondering what the follow-up to the best movie of 2015 might look like.
