There hasn’t been a lot of news out of the Wasteland since Furiosa failed to repeat Mad Max: Fury Road‘s box office success last year. While some believe Furiosa to be a thrilling and expansive follow-up to one of the great action films of our time, it did not ignite the same level of enthusiasm as its predecessor. So it goes. However, over the weekend, the Mad Max Bible, a podcast dedicated to all things Max, reported that director George Miller was working on a Mad Max TV series called The Wasteland. We’ll be slipping on our Mad Max-branded, rumor-mill certified leather jacket for this one, which is to say, please, take all this with a big old grain of salt.
Mad Max Bible‘s sources say that the series would be a prequel to Fury Road and see Max building a new Interceptor, while also fending off guest appearances from Chumbucket and Scrotus. There’s no word yet on whether Piss Boy will make an appearance, but the podcast notes that Miller will not be directing the series.
The basis for The Wasteland comes from a few places within Fury Road and Furiosa‘s 25-year incubation process. First, as Miller has said numerous times, both films were written along with another script for a video game called The Wasteland, which would expand the mythology present in Fury Road and Furiosa. The Wasteland was eventually abandoned and later turned into the 2015 Mad Max video game. However, Miller, ever the perfectionist, was unhappy with the finished product and took his name off the game before release. Nevertheless, when The Wasteland game fell apart the first time, it became an unreleased novella written by Fury Road co-writer Nico Lathouris and later a movie script, which is now, allegedly, being retrofitted into an HBO Max series. The script includes characters hinted at but never fleshed out in the films and explains those flashbacks at the start of Fury Road. Though, as Mad Max Bible points out, Miller has been trying to get a Mad Max TV show off the ground since the late ’80s. The ten-minute report is a short but guzzaline-fueled drive down memory lane and a much-needed oasis in our current Mad Max desert.
Last year, Miller said that he hoped to make a sixth Mad Max movie, entitled Mad Max: The Wasteland, but it depended on a healthy Furiosa box office to get the green light. When Furiosa fell apart at the box office, it seemed unlikely that we’d ever see Scrotus again. Perhaps we shall ride eternal on the Wasteland with him once more.
