It’s pretty silly to get hung up on how much money a movie makes. To obsess over box office is to think like a studio executive — or maybe worse, like the “analysts” who fill trade columns with their salivating desire to see, say, Kevin Costner lose his shirt on an ambitious, big-swing passion project like Horizon: An American Saga. “Movies live forever,” the actor-director told IndieWire this past summer. “It’s not about the opening weekend.” Amen to that, brother.
All the same, dismay is a totally natural response to seeing something you love greeted with a big, fat shrug. Horizon fans felt that pain once the first chapter of Costner’s planned multipart epic landed with a thud back in June. Yours truly, meanwhile, has reserved his sympathy pangs for a different Saga — another Western of sorts, and another meaty prologue released by Warner Bros. How, in a year when every major hit was a franchise play, when people saw almost nothing but sequels and prequels and part whatever of bifurcated stories, could so many have slept on a movie as magnificent as Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga?
To be clear, George Miller’s latest trip to the grungy, burning-rubber nightmare tomorrow wasn’t entirely neglected. Reviews were mostly admiring, if qualified in their praise. And a quick search of X and Letterboxd will reveal a flurry of reverently posted screenshots and pithy praise. But by the cold calculus of receipts, Furiosa is a flop. Globally, it barely recouped its $160-plus million budget, and it fell well short of what its predecessor — the 2015 death-race extravaganza Mad Max: Fury Road — had made in theaters nine years earlier.
That nearly decade-long gap between entries is probably one big reason the turnout for Furiosa was soft. Not that the R-rated fifth installment of a franchise that ignited back in the 1980s would have been a sure thing even in the immediate wake of the last installment. We’re talking, too, about a Mad Max movie without Mad Max — or, for that matter, any of the same stars. And people tend to forget, after the Oscar wins and the best-of-the-decade hosannas, that Fury Road didn’t exactly make a fortune either. Just how much of a halo effect could be expected from it?
The public indifference to Furiosa stings, at least for those of us who regard it as one of the true visions of 2024 — a blazing fallen-world opus with soul and style and flabbergasting visual imagination to burn. An absolute spectacle. How did this grand production come nowhere near the money made by Dune, to name yet another Warner Bros. epic of death and sand? What really stings, though, is the nagging feeling that Furiosa’s box office performance was disappointing, in part, because the people who did see it found the movie kind of disappointing.
Even if you disagreed, even if you adored Miller’s sprawling prequel, you could see the logic of their lukewarm takes. After all, Fury Road is a very hard act to follow. With that Mad Max saga, Miller sped to a new Valhalla of virtuosic vehicular mayhem. By tethering a two-hour chase sequence to Charlize Theron’s star performance as a metal-armed, big-rig liberator, the mighty Furiosa, he made a Mad Max every bit as allegorically resonant as it was bewilderingly exciting. Racing towards its 10th anniversary, it doesn’t seem hyperbolic at all to identify it as one of the greatest action movies ever banged into improbable existence.
That’s a lot to top, and even critics who liked Furiosa couldn’t resist drawing unflattering comparisons. The carnage, they noted, was much more digital, with Miller cutting back a little on the daredevil stunt driving and practical effects work of Fury Road — two elements that contributed to its downright mythologized reputation as a masterpiece forged from a troubled production. What really vexed the underwhelmed was how Miller had followed an action movie of ruthless forward momentum with something baggier: a deliberately paced chronicle with only intermittent glimmers of Fury Road’s gas-guzzling lunacy.
Furiosa, it must be confessed, does not reach the same heights of jaw-dropping splendor. Truly, the worst that can be said of it is that it’s not Fury Road. But isn’t that also what’s special about the film? It’s not trying to be a movie you’ve seen already. Miller, who’s never really repeated himself with this series (every Mad Max is kind of its own eccentric thing), draws a direct line of continuity to Fury Road without mimicking its tight time frame and daisy-chained set piece structure. Having already perfected that form, what would be the point of recycling it?
The opportunity to fashion an origin story for Theron’s instantly iconic action heroine (played, this time, by Anya Taylor-Joy with the radiant ocular expressiveness of a silent-era starlet), became a chance to take a longer, wider view of The Wasteland — to make a kind of Dickensian epic about growing up in the franchise’s dystopian outlaw Outback. Told in chapters and across several decades, Furiosa forgoes the speed-demon gallop of its predecessor in favor of a leisurely, novelistic burrow into the politics and culture of this dead-end world. That may not be what everyone wants from a Mad Max movie, but it’s remarkable to see Miller once more rethink the franchise he launched 45 years ago.
Furiosa is the longest Mad Max movie by a long shot. It’s also maybe the weirdest and the saddest and the bleakest. There are times where it barely plays like an action movie — another bold gambit on Miller’s part. Because it’s laying out the tortured backstory of its title character, Furiosa can’t deliver the kind of cathartic happy ending of sorts that Fury Road offered. Miller pointedly undercuts the primitive satisfaction of his revenge-movie plot, in which Taylor-Joy’s orphaned Furiosa eventually confronts her mother’s killer, the ruthless desperado Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, delivering the darkly charismatic performance of his muscle-man career). One might wager that the deliberate anticlimax of this hefty film is one reason audiences and critics didn’t embrace it quite as heartily.
But anyone with working eyes should have been able to appreciate Furiosa on the most basic, right-brain level. Did the fixation on Miller’s heavier deployment of CGI blind folks to the staggering, undiminished beauty of his imagery? On the cusp of his 80th birthday, the Aussie legend is still operating at a pinnacle of grand canvas blockbuster craftsmanship. The movie unfurls one great shot, moment, or sequence after another. An opening nocturnal pursuit through the desert. A siege on a war rig every bit as amazing as Fury Road’s best pageants of blood and steel. The crucifixion of Furiosa’s mother as seen in the reflection of our heroine’s welling adolescent eye. The film uses the desert as strikingly as David Lean and Sergio Leone did.
Some objected to Furiosa on principle— to the notion that Theron’s character and her history needed to be fleshed out further. Owen Gleiberman, in a recent Variety piece on Hollywood’s franchise obsession, called it “an epic prequel to a movie that was better off not having one.” It’s a sentiment shared by critic Mike D’Angelo, who wrote that “none of that backstory is necessary to us, the viewers seeking insane automotive thrills.” Did Fury Road demand two-and-a-half hours of retroactive setup? Not really — it worked splendidly in isolation, with the character’s redemption arc implied rather than explicated. But the two films nonetheless inform each other in a rather dramatically productive way; they feel of a piece, even in their stylistic disparity. Returning again to Mad Max, Miller justifies Hollywood’s relentless exploitation of old IP through the sheer force of his conviction.
Fury Road was a miracle. Somehow, Miller had convinced a risk-averse Hollywood studio to give him $150 million to crash cars in the desert. The very existence of such an idiosyncratic blockbuster — a personal vision in the guise of a shameless reboot, blown up to IMAX scale — is difficult to fathom. Furiosa undeniably sits in that film’s shadow, in multiple respects. But it’s a miracle, too: a weird, moving, operatic addition to the mythology Miller has been unfurling, on and off, since the late 1970s. The muted reaction to Furiosa makes you wonder if, in a weird way, people are now taking for granted the director’s ability to get these crazy-ambitious genre reveries off the ground. Another decade, another Mad Max. Yawn!
It seems increasingly unlikely, though, that Miller will pull it off again, and not just because he’s getting older. Furiosa bombing all but kills the prospects of The Wasteland, another Mad Max prequel he was kicking around — just as the first chapter of Horizon bombing will probably dry up all studio funding for more. This is the real and maybe the only reason to care about how much money a movie makes: When audiences ignore something audacious, a door closes.
But Furiosa will endure, shiny and chrome. This writer suspects that its fan base and reputation will only expand with time, and that down the road, further removed from Fury Road, cinephiles will feel perplexed that it wasn’t celebrated more upon release. One day, the film’s opening weekend will be just a speck in the rearview mirror. As Costner put it, movies — especially ones this special — live forever.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is now streaming on Max, and available to rent or purchase from the major digital services. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
