Continuity within the Mad Max film sequence is fairly complicated. It could be arduous to consider, however the 40-year-old franchise spawned from a micro-budget Australian film about raiders in a post-apocalyptic wasteland doesn’t even have essentially the most coherent timeline. Furiosa, the full-speed-ahead newest movie within the sequence, doesn’t clear something up, though it does have a particular timeline connection to its predecessor, Mad Max: Fury Highway. However we’ll do our greatest that can assist you perceive it.
The primary vital factor to recollect about Mad Max’s timeline is that it kind-of-sort-of received rebooted. Fury Highway, the fourth installment within the sequence, was initially deliberate for manufacturing within the ’90s or early 2000s, with Mel Gibson returning to his central position as roving loner Max . Nevertheless, after quite a few delays, and quite a few cases of Mel Gibson being a horrible particular person in public, the film received an up to date script and a brand new Max — the a lot youthful Tom Hardy.
With the change in actors and in Max’s obvious age, the sequence needed to be modified barely, too. So Fury Highway is basically set in an alternate timeline from the unique motion pictures, the place key occasions occur at barely completely different instances. In Fury Highway’s timeline, the nuclear annihilation of giant parts of humanity occurred between the occasions of Mad Max and The Highway Warrior, somewhat than after The Highway Warrior, like they do within the authentic trilogy.
This feels particularly complicated provided that Furiosa’s first trailer says the film takes place 45 years after “the Collapse.” Technically, this implies the film most likely takes place rather less than 45 years after the occasions of The Highway Warrior. This doesn’t make a ton of sense when in comparison with the occasions of Fury Highway, particularly if it’s the identical Max character.
However should you’re making an attempt to sq. that math both with the occasions of the unique Mad Max trilogy or with Fury Highway, let me supply some useful recommendation: Don’t. It most likely doesn’t make sense. In actual fact, the comedian books that got here out since Fury Highway tried to suit its timeline again into the unique trilogy, and by no means received near succeeding.
And you recognize what? That’s OK.
Mad Max director, author, and creator George Miller, in his infinite knowledge, rightly determined with the discharge of Fury Highway that perhaps Max is an thought bigger than petty grievances like canon and continuity. Max is a fable and a legend, and as Miller himself stated, something that occurs to him is simply “an episode” in a tumultuous life, with no particular connection wanted. As he put it in a press convention for Fury Highway:
All of the movies don’t have any strict chronology. It’s most likely after Thunderdome, but it surely’s an episode within the lifetime of Max and this world. It’s mainly an episode, and it’s us revisiting that world. I by no means wrote the story, any of the tales, with a chronological connection.
Furiosa is not any completely different, and that first trailer stated as a lot in its first few seconds. That is her Odyssey. She’s destined to turn out to be a fable, and myths are too vital to fret about precisely how the main points line up. We all know this can be a prequel as a result of it offers together with her childhood and younger maturity; we all know it spans 15 years of her life as a result of she tells us within the film itself that 15 years have handed since we first noticed her on display. However when it comes to precisely how a lot time passes between the tip of Furiosa and the start of Fury Highway… Miller isn’t involved with that, and we don’t must be both.