Furiosa is reportedly making a surprising Mad Max: Fury Road tie-in canon - even more than the original movies
Another good reason to replay it this year.
If you were already planning to replay or visit for the first time 2015's Mad Max game, you'll be pleased to learn it might be part of the Furiosa and Fury Road canon continuity.
Film critic Drew McWeeny, whom Twitter folks into movies should know by now, shared the tidbit on X on December 30, sending the Mad Max fandom into another craze. While most reviews of the game back in the day weren't glowing, it quickly gained a cult following thanks to its remarkable presentation and the satisfying vehicular combat. It also shared many aesthetic similarities (and more than one narrative nod) with Mad Max: Fury Road even though it wasn't directly connected to the movie. Receiving word (which, we must note, cannot confirm) that Furiosa's script contains notes which make it canon is kind of a big deal. McWeeny has been a reliable source in the past when it comes to movie scripts and behind-the-scenes info, but we should approach this carefully.
If you're not too familiar with the Mad Max movie series, it's our duty to let you know the continuity is a bit of a mess to the point we could consider it non-existent before Fury Road was released. The entire thing appears to follow the format of legends told around a campfire during the post-Collapse years, with the mythical figure of Max Rockatansky aka The Road Warrior at the center of them. Furiosa, a direct prequel of 2015's action masterpiece, and the game appear to be changing that though.
Back in 2013, Avalanche Studios game designer Emil Kraftling said they hadn't approached the game as a tie-in because of their bad reputation: "From the get go that's how we wanted it, because movie tie-in games tend to be quite bad, and we really want to be wary of heading there." The final product, however, seemingly tied into Fury Road despite not featuring Tom Hardy in the titular role nor being marketed alongside the movie. Moreover, God of War (2018) director Cory Barlog once worked on a Mad Max game that ultimately didn't happen and instead became the basis for Avalanche's own project. Via GameSpot: "It's just unfortunate the way that sometimes games go that they ended up going in a different direction, and George and I ended up not working on that one with them."
In Avalanche's game, Max faces a well-organized army of raiders led by Scabrous Scrotus in order to reach the legendary Plains of Silence, where he hopes to find peace at last. According to what we already knew, Scrotus is one of Immortan Joe's sons, plus the game heavily featured the iconic War Boys, so it was already presented as tangential to the movie which was released in the same year even if Miller never explicitly came out and said it was a canonical story. Now, with the filmmaker openly teasing Max is "lurking around somewhere" during the events of Furiosa, we have to wonder if there'll be a definite reference or even a cameo of the Road Warrior battling Scrotus' evil forces while Anya Taylor-Joy's Furiosa clashes against Chris Hemsworth's Dementus. Even if Miller didn't end up working directly on the 2015 game, it'd be a nice and clean way of 'reclaiming' that corner of the universe he created.
Regardless, we highly recommend that you check out the Mad Max game if you haven't already, as it's one of the most underrated open-world action-adventure video games in recent memory.
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