George Lucas once argued that The Phantom Menace was the Star Wars movie he would have made back in the 1970s, had special effects technology been sufficiently advanced. With Mad Max: Fury Road, director George Miller took that concept – the turbo charged, high-end revamp – and managed to get it out of first gear.
Where The Phantom Menace had only the most ardent of Star Wars acolytes begging for more, few movies of recent years have left audiences wanting a sequel like Fury Road did, with its haul of $379m (£267m) at the global box office and six gongs at the Oscars. Miller has been happy to allow rumours to proliferate of at least two more episodes set in postapocalyptic Australia, not least the tantalising prospect of a Furiosa spin-off starring Charlize Theron as the one-armed feminist totem. But we have heard very little – beyond occasional rumblings about battles between Miller’s production company and Warner Bros studio over profits from the film – about when we might actually get to see them.
Last week the Sydney Morning Herald revealed the legal spat over Fury Road’s financial splits, with Miller’s production company Kennedy Miller Mitchell having filed a document in the New South Wales supreme court accusing Warner of acting in a “high-handed, insulting or reprehensible” manner by failing to deliver a bonus to Miller for bringing the movie in under its agreed $157m budget and breaching a co-financing agreement.
Warner has countered that Fury Road’s production costs ended up north of $185m due to production delays that put the film’s release back by 14 months. Of course, Kennedy Miller Mitchell has its own counterclaims. Suffice to say it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting a Fury Road sequel any time soon. Warner is even challenged Miller’s right for the case to be heard in Australia rather than California.
Those of us for whom Fury Road was such an unexpected pleasure will no doubt be on the side of Miller, especially as the Herald also reveals how Warner wanted the reboot to be a PG-13 movie with a running time of no longer than 100 minutes rather than the bloody, R-rated epic that eventually hit cinemas. There are also suggestions that the studio hoped to change the movie’s ending.
Since Fury Road is perhaps the most well loved genre movie since Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, it is unlikely there will be much sympathy for Warner among the public. But it would also be a pity to see financial issues putting the kibosh on Max’s adventures in the dystopian outback. A similar legal spat between Peter Jackson and Warner offshoot New Line (as well as the financial woes of studio MGM) was partly to blame for the near decade-long gap between the release of Jackson’s acclaimed Lord of the Rings trilogy and its Hobbit prequels. One wonders how the latter project might have turned out had it not faced such a wearisome trek through movie-production Mordor, and whether Jackson would have felt so inclined towards expanding the book into three movies if it had taken him two years rather than nine to get the adaptation green-lit.
Moreover, Miller is 73. This is a film-maker who has had a storied career – one that reached a – pinnacle with Fury Road – and it would be a huge pity to see such an impressive late flowering delayed for political reasons. Those who marvelled at Miller’s blitzkrieg action, progressive politics and spectacular world-building won’t want to wait a minute longer than necessary for the engines to start revving for part two.
