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Saturday Evening Movie Thread 06/15/2024 [TheJamesMadison]

Mad Max

With the release (and box office failure) of George Miller's latest film and seemingly final entry in his Mad Max franchise, Furiosa, it feels like a perfect opportunity to reflect back on one of the weirdest, enduring action franchises of the past forty-four years, consider its place in the larger culture, and wonder why the culture could embrace the second-to-last entry so fully while leaving the last entry in the dust of the Wasteland.

Born of Miller's desire to become a filmmaker and his experience with crash victims while working as an ER doctor at St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, Australia, Mad Max was a worldwide success, raking in about $100 million, but only about $8 million from the US. The sequel, Mad Max 2, was retitled The Road Warrior in the US because the first film had such a small impact and made almost $24 million in the US while (very briefly) becoming the biggest grosser in Australian box office history (quickly supplanted by Peter Weir's Gallipoli). This success led to the largest budget for a Mad Max film with Beyond Thunderdome made for $10 million and only bringing in $36 million at the US box office which was better than the previous film, but it performed much worse in Australia itself, effectively ending the franchise. It was never more than a modest financial win of a franchise, and Miller went off to make other things for more than a decade.

He actually went deep into pre-production on the sequel, Fury Road twice (it may actually be three because the final, successful effort to get Fury Road off the ground took several years and actually changed filming continents from Australia to Africa), and it was a very expensive production (probably helped in no small part by the successive efforts at getting things started which were probably rolled into the final cost). With a final budget reportedly somewhere between $150 and $180 million, Fury Road was easily the most successful entry in the franchise making $380 million. Miller was allowed to find the money to make Furiosa after he took a break to make his smaller, Three Thousand Years of Longing, and this production was also wildly expensive (reportedly about $170 million) and...it has flopped very hard. It makes me sad.

So, with the basic history of the franchise out of the way, let's talk about the movies themselves.

Continuity

One of the most noteworthy things across the first four films is the complete lack of continuity between them. The tightest connection is between the first and the second, the second using footage from the first as a prologue narrated by the Feral Child, but the film itself doesn't make any real reference to the first film except in the most oblique of ways (dialogue about Max having lost...something in his past). The world as presented in both films are so far apart in terms of collapse (the first is collapsing and the second has been collapsed for a while into the Wasteland). There's a connection, but there's been no real effort to make the details match.

From the second to the third is where it's obvious that continuity is simply not a concern. Max's V8 was destroyed at the start of the third act in the second film, but he somehow got it back and has attached a team of camels to it to drive it across the desert. This is also where the reusing of actors can get confusing with Bruce Spence playing the flyer of a gyrocopter in The Road Warrior and then a flyer of a jalopy who is a completely different person in Beyond Thunderdome. I think this is made even more apparent through the use of Max as a character at this point: he's barely one beyond an archetype in Beyond Thunderdome. There was an effort in The Road Warrior to give him an arc towards the point when he would help the isolated group of oil rig workers, but by the third film, he just helps people he comes across because that's who he is. There's no effort to connect the older girl who runs towards Bartertown to set up the second half of the film with Max's past in any way. It's, at best, assumed that this is just how Max treats helpless people he comes across in the Wasteland, but his efforts just kind of happen within the film itself. It's just what he does. He's kind of stopped being a character and is instead a vessel through which Miller guides the audience in his exploration of his created Wasteland.

Of course, the whole continuity thing goes out the window with Fury Road, but it's interesting because this is where continuity actually finally became important to him. If Miller were allowed to make a dozen more Mad Max films, I'm not sure how far that effort at continuity would have gone. Everything that he and his cowriter Nico Lathouris came up with regarding the three major fortresses of the Wasteland (the Citadel, Gastown, and the Bullet Farm) that formed the implied backstory of the world in the fourth entry of the franchise ended up getting explored in the fifth, Furiosa, in rather extreme detail. And, reportedly, if Miller had gotten to make one more (very unlikely now), it would have been called The Wasteland and shown how Max himself dealt with this background in the year leading up to the events of Fury Road.

So, Fury Road either finally allowed him to fully realize what the Wasteland would be, or he would have latched onto this manifestation of the Wasteland for three films before junking it to form another vision further down the line where Max just kind of shows up and helps people.

Storytelling

What is obvious through all of this, especially as the franchise gets into its later segments, is that Miller was using the Wasteland and Max and Furiosa as excuses to explore his other thematic and narrative concerns: storytelling, myth, and how they can bring people together. It's interesting that Miller chose to make a movie in between Fury Road and Furiosa. Titled Three Thousand Years of Longing, it's the story of a loner, female, academic who encounters a djinn and how the two connect through him telling her stories until they fall in love. After the runaway success of Fury Road, Miller went off and made a quiet movie about connecting through stories? That should tell you something about his priorities as a storyteller.

And it's easy to go back and look at the last four films of the Mad Max franchise through that lens. It just outright doesn't apply to the first film, but the second is framed by the Feral Child recalling the events in voiceover many years after the events, the third has a lot within it about storytelling around the youths maintaining the myth of Captain Walker (of which Max is supposed to be the culmination of the prophecy) and its meaning to them as a whole while ending with Savannah telling Max's story to a group of children. The fourth includes written text from "The History Man" helping to frame it, but it's better understood as part of the whole of which Furiosa is included where The History Man is an actual character. He provides some voiceover and obviously is the actual source of the story, especially evident at the end when he actually provides several different ends for the main antagonist, Dementus.

So, combine the fact that Max is largely just an archetype through most of these films combined with the emphasis on storytellers and myth, and you've got what Miller is actually doing across this weird, grotesque franchise: he's building myth himself. It's about ever-changing formulas that speak to the combined experience of living to each of us individually like how the Greeks derived life lessons from stories of gods and heroes of their own myth. And this is where I find the most interest across the whole franchise, how it feels like a series of well-told oral histories of a time long past but not quite forgotten. In that paradigm, that Max kind of never changes isn't the point. That there are vastly different styles of storytelling and visuals can be attributable to different storytellers. It creates this swirling concept of what storytelling is that I really appreciate. It's unique to us all, but it has similar effects at the same time, even when we're telling the same kind of story in different ways.

Box Office


So, I actually set out to write only about this topic, but the ace discussed it a few times over the past couple of weeks. It became less important as I explored the world of the Wasteland again, ending with my journey to the theater to catch Furiosa in its third weekend of release (I've been to the theater twice in the past six months, the other time for Dune: Part Two...having two small children and no free babysitters make disappearing for a few hours on my own to spend $15 to see a movie a hard sell). Furiosa is the only film of the summer that I have been excited to see. Looking ahead to the other releases like Deadpool vs. Wolverine or Inside Out, on the high end, or Longlegs, on the low end, it really was just Furiosa that got me revved. And that's important to note: I know that my tastes are out of alignment with the larger culture.

I've known it for a long time. I've known it since middle school when I was obsessed with Star Wars in the period between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace. I was the only kid in school who read the Expanded Universe books, and I didn't care. I got so much enjoyment out of that. That extended to high school when I discovered both Dune and The Lord of the Rings. That Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings ended up making a lot of money at the box office through their cinematic adaptations felt more like a fluke than some sort of alignment between my tastes and the wider culture's because there were all sorts of movies that made a lot of money at the time that I didn't care about. So, me being excited for a film (I remember playing the trailer for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford endlessly for months before its release), I know, doesn't mean anything regarding the wider culture.

So, I reflect back on the decision to greenlight Furiosa, and I have questions. Sure, I was looking forward to it, but was anyone else? Mad Max has never been a huge box office phenomenon. I went over the numbers in the first section, and making $30 million or so in the 80s wasn't terrible, especially considering the budgets, but they weren't exactly Ghostbusters numbers. Even Fury Road made less than $400 million off of a budget of roughly $180 million. I'm not even sure it made a profit at all in theaters (I suspect that home video and streaming licensing got it over the line in the end).

Culture

I've begun to develop a theory about how art exists within a culture. It takes some truly special combination of forces to strike out against a dominant culture and make a large mark, and I don't think any of the Mad Max movies have proven that when it comes to cultural reach (influence within the film community is something else entirely, not what I'm talking about, and also undeniable regarding, in particular The Road Warrior). They were blips, at best, the largest of them being Fury Road, and we should take a look back at 2015 to see what kind of cultural space that was released into.

In 2015, Fury Road was the 21st biggest film of the year. At the top of the box office chart was Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Right after that was Jurassic World. At number 4 was Avengers: Age of Ultron. At number 6 was Spectre. At number 8 was Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. This was the age of sequels, legacy sequels on long dormant franchises, and spectacle absolutely dominating the box office. This was arguably the height of studios mining their product from the 80s and 90s while continuing existing franchise filmmaking. This was a very big year, and into this year comes another legacy sequel filled with spectacle to the franchise people sort of remembered called Mad Max. Fury Road fit with the times. It fit so well that it did solidly good at the box office behind wildly positive reviews which even led to a Best Picture Oscar nomination. It was a strange time.

Where are we in 2024 with the release of Furiosa? Well, the spectacle film is dying, it seems, in some manner. The Marvel franchise finally saw outright bombs in 2023 with movies like The Marvels and Ant-Man 3: Quantumania. The Fall Guy cratered. On top of that, we're literally decades into this girl-led action hero thing in movies, but also five years removed from the obnoxiously feminist Charlie's Angels reboot flailing horribly along with a wide assortment of glorified straight-to-video female led action films headed by people like Jessica Chastain (Ava, anyone?). So, we're in a moment where the female-led action film almost feels like an outright negative to moviegoers (coincidentally, Bad Boys 4, headlined by two men, including Chris Rock slapper Will Smith, opened above expectations last weekend). In addition, the whole legacy sequel and efforts around continuing franchises seems to be more hit and miss than before. And, again, Fury Road wasn't a huge success at the box office to begin with.

Next I should bring up the concept of the movie star. I largely don't believe it, understanding how it began under Irving Thalberg in the 1920s as a marketing mechanism to help sell movies by telling audiences what types of films they were buying tickets for through the use of familiar faces. However, the movie studios definitely believe it, and you've got Furiosa headlined by Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth. Taylor-Joy is...not a movie star by the studios' definition. She headlines films, for sure, but the last few films she was arguably a "star" of were The Northman, Last Night in Soho, and The Menu, none of which exactly set the box office on fire. On the other hand is Hemsworth, and I need to share a small bit of his past box office performance. At, arguably, the height of his fame for playing Thor in the MCU, he was making about $100,000 per movie because the Marvel contracts were very limited but offered great exposure to the actors who signed. He then got a $10 million paycheck to star in Ron Howard's Rush, a film that didn't make $100 million globally, calling into question his ability to open a fim at all. Over the past few years, his only non-MCU credits are either Netflix films or the fourth Men in Black film which bombed horribly. These are the two movie stars that a good chunk of the marketing is based around.

Why on earth was Furiosa greenlit with a budget of over $150 million? I mean, I want to live in the world where this grotesque exploration of the Wasteland is some huge box office success, but it doesn't matter that Furiosa isn't actually about the battle of the sexes or whatnot, it was being released in a culture where even the perception of that stuff is failing to find audiences. This was a huge, grand miscalculation on the part of Warner Bros. I mean, I'm glad the film exists, and I can't wait to add it to my physical collection. However, this was insanity. Sure, I'm Monday morning quarterbacking, but the signs seem kind of obvious now, and it's not like there weren't voices wondering if a movie centered around Furiosa instead of Max was a good idea to begin with. They were there, but they were getting ignored because wrong-think, I guess. I dunno.

The Future in the Wasteland

So, does the failure of Furiosa mean that theaters are dying? It's certainly not helping matters, but there's a lot coming up that's going to make gobs of money. I don't have a crystal ball, but it seems safe to assume that we're in a period of contraction that will stop at some point. We're not going to get to a point where there are no theaters.

I think the bigger lesson though regarding Furiosa is about risk within a culture, understanding where the culture is, and playing to it. Fury Road coming out in 2015 feels like a fluke that it was able to ride to moderate success. Furiosa coming out in 2024 feels like a fluke that it was able to ride to ignominious failure. Would a Max led prequel/sequel/whatever done better? It's possible, maybe enough to edge the release from "abject failure" to "modest success", but I also don't have access to a multi-verse viewing device. Would it have been possible to realize in May of October 2022 (when the film went into production) that by 2024 all of the assumptions would have all collapsed? I have no idea, but it does feel like an interesting case study for how a film's wide release in theaters is subject to larger forces.

That leaves us with probably no future regarding more adventures in the Wasteland, at least in cinemas. But, then again, studio executives are stupid and are already trying to reboot The Matrix three years after the last one failed at the box office. Who knows?

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Inside Out 2

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Mad Max (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "So, the real star is George Miller, director, but the real drag is George Miller, co-screenwriter. Another draft, potentially written by someone else, could have smoothed things out and given it real dramatic structure, but the director did his all with what he had." [Personal Collection]

Mad Max 2 (or, The Road Warrior) (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "I think I'm kind of weird pointing out those small elements that don't quite work, but whatever. I still get a real kick out of everything anyway." [Personal Collection]

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's kind of goofy. I find value with the children's oasis. It's thinner than it probably should be. But, it moves quickly and entertains as it goes. It's a fun time." [Personal Collection]

Mad Max Fury Road (Rating 4/4) Full Review "This feels like a talented, older filmmaker going for broke one last time. It has the same frenetic energy of the first film, but it has the narrative lessons learned over time as well." [Personal Collection]

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's a surprisingly quiet look at vengeance, storytelling, myth, and the insanity of Miller's vision of a post-apocalyptic Australia that, I think, will only grow in appreciation over time as more people discover it through streaming and home video." [Theater]

The Exorcist (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It's something of a complete package of a film, perhaps perfect in its construction and effect. It's really great stuff." [Personal Collection]

Sorcerer (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It's an incredible ride, intricately built, and masterfully executed. It's quiet and tense and thrilling. I have issue with the ending, but that's kind of it. Otherwise, this is darn near perfect." [The Criterion Channel]

To Live and Die in L.A. (Rating 4/4) Full Review "The film begins as a generic, overwrought police procedural and then uses its character journeys to deepen the material and find actual meaning in the whole thing." [The Criterion Channel]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 7/6, and it will talk about the films directed by William Friedkin.