Did 'Furiosa' Flop Kill 'Mad Max' Franchise?

Forty-five years after George Miller introduced audiences to Mad Max, the auteur may have finally hit the end of the road through the postapocalyptic wasteland unless he finds some high-octane gasoline soon.

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The revered filmmaker’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga bowed to a disappointing $32 million domestically for the four-day Memorial Day weekend and $36.5 million overseas, diminishing hopes for Mad Max: The Wasteland, another Max installment Miller has been toying with for years.

Miller and Nico Lathouris wrote the scripts for both The Wasteland and Furiosa as part of the development process of Mad Max: Fury Road, the 2015 Warner Bros. film that became a surprise awards season juggernaut, winning six Oscars, and which became an instant action classic. The Wasteland would follow Max Rockatansky in the year before Fury Road, and is said to involve a young mother — and (naturally) include plenty of action. 

Ed Morrissey

Maybe they should have done Wasteland first, since it appears to actually be a story about Mad Max. Instead, they did Fury Road to center the action on Charlize Theron while making Max a secondary character in his own 'saga,' and then cut him out almost entirely in Furiosa. Warners and Miller wanted to seize the "girlboss" genre, but discovered too late that it doesn't sell even to the demos they thought they were targeting. The percentage of tickets bought by women dropped from 40% for Fury Road to 29% for Furiosa, and from 31% to 21% in the 18-24YO demo. 

Or as Mark Judge wrote, maybe they just needed better material. And tighter editing. 

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