George Miller is getting an extra year to make sure his follow up to Mad Max: Fury Road is every bit as good as that film. Warner Bros. just announced that it has moved Furiosa, the prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, from winter 2023 to winter 2024. Anya Taylor-Joy stars as the title character, taking over for Charlize Theron, and she’ll appear alongside Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth, and Candyman himself, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. The film will now release on May 24, 2024 instead of June 23, 2023.
Filming is expected to begin in Australia next year and officials there tease it’s going to be the biggest production the country has ever seen. It will have to be to fully do justice to the character Theron made famous in the 2015 masterpiece that co-starred Tom Hardy. This movie, which Miller wrote as part of his research for that movie, explains how and why the powerful Furiosa became who she is.
Miller had hoped Theron would be able to return to the role but seeing as it’s going to be almost 10 years between shoots, he would have had to used complicated de-ageing technology to show a younger version of the character, and he didn’t want to do that.
So, after seeing Edgar Wright’s Last Night In Soho, he went with Taylor-Joy, the Witch and New Mutants actress who continues to become a bigger and bigger star with every role she takes. (Maybe you heard one or two people talking about The Queen’s Gambit over the past year?)
Also part of the Warner Bros. release date news is that the new film version of Salem’s Lot will be out September 9, 2022. Adapted and directed by Gary Dauberman, it stars Alfre Woodard, Lewis Pullman, Bill Camp, Spencer Treat Clark, and William Sadler.
And while the news of an extra year waiting for Furiosa is obviously a little frustrating, never forget just how long the wait was between Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Mad Max: Fury Road (30 years!) and how that turned out. If Furiosa is half as good as Fury Road, it’ll still be one of the best movies released in 2024.