While it’s understood that “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” is a prequel that leads directly into the events of “Mad Max: Fury Road,” director George Miller said he and his team quite heavily debated the inclusion of footage from “Fury Road” during the “Furiosa” credits.
While “Furiosa” doesn’t exactly have a post-credits scene, there is a montage of footage from Miller’s 2015 epic “Fury Road” that plays during the credits, teasing what happens to the character of Furiosa after the events of the film you just watched — played in “Furiosa” by Anya Taylor-Joy and in “Fury Road” by Charlize Theron. Miller told Collider he and his team debated whether to include this montage “a lot.”
“The thing is, what you’re getting at the end credits on ‘Furiosa’ is you’re getting a sample of what happens. So if you haven’t seen ‘Fury Road,’ you’re not getting the experience of ‘Fury Road,’ you’re getting, like, a little mini trailer of it,” he explained. “So, it’s quite a different experience. One is hopefully an immersive experience and the other is a kind of a little taste of it. It’s like if you’re listening to some sort of extended piece of music, a symphony or a rock opera or something, and you just play a few sample bars of it at the end.”
The filmmaker said he ultimately decided to include the footage because the two films are so closely linked.
“These were all things I thought about. But I thought because it feels — I’m sure there are other examples but I can’t think of any — like there’s a direct flow from the end of one story into another one, I felt it was worth doing. And if you haven’t seen ‘Fury Road,’ it really won’t make very much difference at all.”
Miller also revealed in the interview that he has another “Mad Max” story, tentatively titled “The Wasteland,” ready to go depending on how well “Furiosa” does. But like “Furiosa,” it was born out of all the prep that went into making “Fury Road.”
“Mainly because to tell the story of ‘Fury Road,’ which happens over a very compressed amount of time… Picking up all the backstory, all the exposition on the way, everybody working on the film — not only the cars, but all the designers, all the prop makers, everybody — had to understand the backstory very intimately in order for it to be coherent,” he said. “So, we had to write the story of ‘Furiosa’ and the 18 years, as it turns out, before we meet her in ‘Fury Road.’ We also had to write the story of the year of Max in the year before we encounter him in ‘Fury Road.’ So, we have that story. We wrote that as a novella, Nico Lathouris and I, and so that’s the story we have yet to tell.”
Unfortunately, it seems unlikely another “Mad Max” film is going to happen anytime soon as “Furiosa” disappointed at the Memorial Day weekend box office to historically low results.