George Miller clarifies statement: He will direct more MAD MAX movies

Mad Max: Fury Road released to pretty much universal acclaim and was one of last year’s best movies – it also lead to Nick huffing on paint tins with hilarious consequences (he nearly died). As Kervyn said in his review, which you can catch here:

Mad Max: Fury Road is just a monumental achievement that has made its decades-long development worth it. And it’s undoubtedly also the blockbuster to beat this year.

Of course, he did say that before the Star Wars juggernaut rolled into town.

Director George Miller had also previously confirmed that he had plans for a further two movies set in the Mad Max universe, so there was great consternation on Wednesday when it was widely reported (via Page Six) that he was done with the franchise:

I won’t make more Mad Max movies. [Fury Road] was forever getting completed. If you finish one in a year, it’s considered a leap of faith. Start, stop, start again. I’ve shot in Australia in a field of wildflowers and flat red earth when it rained heavily forever. We had to wait 18 months and every return to the US was 27 hours. Those Mad Maxes take forever. I won’t do those any more.

And as Kervyn broke down the incredibly troubled production process Mad Max: Fury Road went through for us, it’s easy to see why Miller would feel that way. However, as it turns out, that quote was all based on a misunderstanding of the reporter’s question and that he was misquoted; and he will indeed be returning to the franchise. As he told TheWrap (via ComingSoon):

That was a completely garbled interview. I was in New York and it was so noisy and the journalist was asking me questions on a red carpet at the National Board of Review.

She completely got the wrong fragments of information that were just not true. I said no, [another ‘Mad Max’ movie] will not be next, and she took that to mean I never wanted to make another ‘Mad Max.’ It won’t necessarily be next, but I have two more stories.

This matches up with what Miller had said just a few days earlier in an interview with Studio 360 as well, which is why people were so shocked by the apparent sudden change of heart:

What happened to Max after ‘Fury Road’? What happened before ‘Fury Road’? What happened to the other characters? Those stories are there — probably not as the next film but the film after. I’d like to do one of them. We’ll see.

As John Lennon said, life is what happens when you’re making other plans. There are so many other directors out there. People are directing younger and younger. They’re getting a real sense of cinema very, very early. There are some great directors out there.

A Mad Max sequel is not in his immediate future though, as he’d told Entertainment Weekly:

I’ve got something a bit smaller before we go back out into the wasteland — something that’s contemporary that we can get through fairly quickly And something with not too much technical difficulty. Something more performance-based and so on, just to clear the exhaust.

What that “something a bit smaller” is we don’t know yet, but here at TheMovies we’re all as a happy as a Babe in mud that Miller isn’t done with the franchise after all. How about you?

Last Updated: January 15, 2016