“….at the end of the day, this thing lives and breathes with [director] George [Miller]. I think Warner Bros. knows that. We are all waiting for him to show us the way,” Charlize Theron said this summer about more movies beyond “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Two years have passed since the phenomenal action movie blazed into cinemas, and while there has been lots of talk and hope about more films to follow, Miller hasn’t been in a rush. The director has said he wants to do a small movie first before returning to the grand scale of a “Mad Max” movie, but it looks like there’s another reason things aren’t moving.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that there’s a legal battle emerging between Miller’s production company Kennedy Miller Mitchell and Warner Bros. over unpaid earnings from “Mad Max: Fury Road.”
According to Kennedy Miller Mitchell, if the final net cost of ‘Fury Road’ didn’t exceed $157 million, they would receive a $7 million bonus. Even more, if Warner Bros. decided to co-finance the picture, Kennedy Miller Mitchell would be given the first opportunity to participate. However, Kennedy Miller Mitchell claims that Warner Bros. made decisions that caused ‘Fury Road’ to go over budget, and even more, entered a co-financing deal with Brett Ratner’s RatPac Entertainment without reaching out to Miller’s company first.
“We would much prefer to be making movies with Warner Bros than litigating with them but, after trying for over a year, we were unable to reach a satisfactory resolution and have now had to resort to a lawsuit to sort things out,” Miller and Mitchell said in a statement.
“We disagree and will vigorously defend against these claims,” Warner Bros. replied.
Needless to say, this is probably the reason why we haven’t heard anything official on the ‘Mad Max’ front. The case was recently ruled that it could be arbitrated in Australia, so we’ll see how that winds up going, but it looks those ‘Fury Road’ sequels are going to be a long way off.
