Upcoming Mad Max spinoff Furiosa will not hit theatres until 2024—but this faraway release date is great news for fans of the long-running series. The Mad Max franchise has come a long way since its inauspicious beginnings. Starting life as a gritty, post-apocalyptic revenge thriller shot on the cheap in Australia, George Miller’s dystopian sci-fi series has since gone on to become one of sci-fi cinema’s most enduringly popular franchises.

While the original Mad Max was only set in the future to save on production costs, the marginally more expensive and massively more ambitious sequel The Road Warrior allowed Miller to expand on his vision of a future after civilization crumbles. Beyond Thunderdome offered an even more immersive, if more divisive, look into Miller’s Mad Max universe before the franchise was put on pause for no less than three decades. However, despite all odds, 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road won both critical acclaim and financial success upon release, proving the most popular entry in the series so far.

Fury Road’s upcoming Furiosa spinoff may not be taking a full three decades, but the long-awaited outing has been pushed until 2024 in a move that could prove to be surprisingly good news for the franchise. The lengthy wait between Fury Road and Beyond: Thunderdome resulted in a much more critically acclaimed sequel and, with Furiosa’s larger scope and epic story to tell, it is promising to see Miller and company investing the time necessary for the sprawling saga even if the movie will be arriving a lot later than expected. This release date delay is not the first bit of Furiosa news to divide fans, but it is proof that the future of the franchise is in safe hands.


Shortly after the announcement that Furiosa would receive a spinoff movie and the plot would center around her origin story, some fans were dismayed to learn that Anya Taylor-Joy would play the titular role. However, it could be argued that Miller was right to recast original Furiosa actor Charlize Theron as digitally de-aging the actor would have been prohibitively expensive and visually distracting, and the much younger Taylor-Joy allows the prequel to take Furiosa’s origin story back far earlier. This means the Furiosa spinoff can finally illustrate how the world ended in the Mad Max universe, a contentious question with no canon answer—until now.

Fuel shortages, nuclear war, and battles for dwindling resources have all been blamed at different points of the franchise, but delaying the release of Furiosa’s spinoff movie until 2024 will allow the filmmakers time to finally answer this inquiry definitively and settle a long-running debate among the fandom. While the cause of Mad Max’s apocalypse changes between movies, a prequel to Fury Road that is as expansive and epic as Furiosa can offer a clear and appropriately dramatic answer once and for all. The first spinoff of the Mad Max franchise could thus become its most ambitious installment yet, thanks to its lengthy production schedule and faraway release date.