We’re just over a week out from Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga‘s descent upon cinemas, and with a Cannes Film Festival appearance resulting in a flurry of praiseful early reviews, the hype is firing off on every, rugged, heavy metal cylinder.
Such is the case when you have an artistic dynamo in Anya Taylor-Joy leading the charge of a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, which needs no introduction as one of the most revered films of the 21st century. Indeed, it may be squaring up against some mighty fine blockbuster fare in The Fall Guy and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, but Furiosa‘s thrill ride is sure to be the most singular of them all. After all, it’s not often these days that post-apocalyptic stories—perhaps the most unsung slice of genre fiction out there—are given a platform of this magnitude.
And Mad Max has certainly been one of the reigning conduits for such a genre, if its résumé is anything to go by.
How many Mad Max movies are there?
Including Furiosa, there arefive Mad Max films in the whole franchise, with a sixth entry—titled Mad Max: The Wasteland somewhere in the margins of pre- and mid-production.
The original Mad Max kicked things off in 1979, which told the story of a former police officer (the one and only “Mad” Max Rockatansky) who finds a new calling in life as a vigilante, right as his homeland of Australia finds its civilization falling to pieces. Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior) followed in 1981, in which Max goes toe-to-toe with a group of marauders laying waste to a defenseless community.
Then came 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which saw Max get deserted in the desert after a political/gladiatorial mishap of sorts, and later leads a group of orphans to what he hopes is salvation, and what he knows will be vengeance against the malicious Aunty Entity.
Thirty years later in 2015, George Miller captured the attention of pretty much everybody with Mad Max: Fury Road, his awards-season darling whose echelon Furiosa seems all but ready to fly into with just as much grit. In the film, Max teams up with Furiosa as they enter a days-long, desert-spanning chase across countless miles of desert, hoping to find sanctuary for the sex slaves of Immortan Joe, who pursues them throughout.
And then, of course, we have Furiosa, and we can all see what unfolds there when it releases to theaters on May 24 in the United States.