While there is a lot of excitement about this little news tidbit, it’s not entirely a surprise that George Miller has two “Mad Max: Fury Road” scripts ready to go. He pretty much said the same thing a year ago. “In order to tell [the ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’] story, we came up with two others. We’ve written the screenplay of one and the novelization of another, but it’s a very rough novel,” Miller said at Comic-Con in 2014. “We kept working on them while we were working on other things.” But my guess is that novel he’s talking about has finally been flipped to script form.
Chatting with Top Gear, Miller pretty much reiterates what he said before, noting that the screenplays were borne from diving into the backstory of the characters in ‘Fury Road.’ “…we ended up with two scripts, without really trying,” he said. “We’re talking to the studio [Warner Bros.] about it as we speak, but which one of the two stories will happen next, I’m not so sure.”
But even if Warner Bros. does decide to greenlight a followup — which they don’t seem to be in any hurry of doing — Miller has already stated he wants to do a less taxing movie first. “I want to do a small film without special effects before I do any of that, just to do it quickly,” the director said. “We shot ‘Fury Road’ for eight months… that’s a lot. Every day in the heat and the dust, doing these stunts, it’s very wearing. We’ve got two more planned, but at some point in the future.”
My guess is that Warner Bros. will look at home video and VOD numbers before making any decisions, and with Miller in no rush to make the sequels, the studio has time to make a decision on how they wish to proceed. But whatever happens, the studio is clearly eager to work with Miller, with the director confirming in recent weeks he’s been in discussions with the studio about a variety of projects, including one that has already stalled out once.
“There was talk of it [the live action ‘Akira’],” Miller told Yahoo UK. “But I’ve got so many things on my dance card, I don’t have the time to do everything.” While that would be really interesting, I’d rather see Miller return to the wastelands of ‘Mad Max.’
