Mad Max: Furiosa Circling Cannes 2024 Premiere

Mad Max: Furiosa is set to debut in theaters next year, taking the realm of George Miller's beloved franchise down a new path. As the title suggests, Furiosa will be a prequel film following a younger Imperator Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy), and her allies and adversaries prior to the events of Mad Max: Fury Road. According to a new report from Variety, Furiosa could end up making a pretty big splash next year, through a premiere at the annual Cannes Film Festival. If this did end up being the case, it would be the latest of several of Miller's films to do so, after Fury Road in 2015 and Three Thousand Years of Longing in 2022. But as the report stresses, the rumored plan for Furiosa to premiere at Cannes is currently tentative, and would depend on when the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike gets resolved, allowing for the cast to promote the film.

"We kept an extraordinary memory of the world premiere of 'Fury Road' at Cannes," Cannes chief Thierry Fremaux told Variety. "It would be wonderful to welcome them again with 'Furiosa,' especially since George Miller was a marvelous jury president in 2016. I know he's working on the film and I hope it will be at Cannes."

What Is Mad Max: Furiosa About?

In Mad Max: Furiosa, as the world fell, young Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and falls into the hands of a great Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus. Sweeping through the Wasteland they come across the Citadel presided over by The Immortan Joe. While the two Tyrants war for dominance, Furiosa must survive many trials as she puts together the means to find her way home. The film will also star Chris Hemsworth as Dementus.

"When we wrote Mad Max, the task was to tell a story that was always on the run and to see how much the audience could pick up in passing," Miller previously explained to The AV Club. "That was one of the tricks of Mad Max: Fury Road, that there would be references to things of where she's from, why they're doing things, but it was always on the run. There were very few moments of quiet. We never explained how she lost her arm. We never explain what the actual Green Place Of Many Mothers was. We never explained the workings of the Citadel. So we had the screenplay virtually complete before we shot Fury Road, and we did it because it arose out of wanting to explain to everybody who Furiosa was—to Charlize when she took on the role, and to all the actors and the designers and everybody else working on the Citadel and so on. The feeling was, gee, this is a pretty good screenplay, and then I kept saying to myself, 'if Fury Road works, I'd really like to tell this story.'"

"So it came about, I'm not going to say accidentally, but it came out of a need to explain [Fury Road's] world which, as I said, essentially happened over three days and two nights," Miller continued. "It's really trying to explain how that world came to be. We also wrote, not a screenplay, but almost in novel form, Nico Lathouris and I, what happened to Max in that year before, and that's something that we'll look at further down the track later. But in telling each other the story of Furiosa, everything in Fury Road had to be explained. In my mind, I have a back story of the Doof Warrior, who plays the guitar. How could a blind man who all he can do is play a guitar, how does he get to survive in a wasteland where everybody is in extremis? How did he come to be there? So we wrote little stories for every character when we made Fury Road."

Mad Max: Furiosa is currently scheduled to be released in theaters on May 24, 2024.