The next Mad Max movie may be another prequel to Fury Road, actually

As we eagerly await Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, we're also wondering what's going on with the actual follow-up to 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road. Well, it now sounds like it could be another prequel!

Look, I'll forever be on George Miller's team, but it's a bit odd the saga is now kind of stuck circling around Fury Road's events. In fact, even the highly underrated Mad Max video game released later that year has been confirmed to be another canon prequel.

This tidbit comes from Entertainment Weekly's in-depth look at Furiosa and some of the stories surrounding the making of both it and Fury Road.

According to Miller himself, Max and his iconic Interceptor actually show up in Furiosa through a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo, but there's more story to tell regarding the lead-up to Fury Road: "In doing what we did in the preparation of Mad Max: Fury Road, we also wrote what happened to Max in the year before we encounter him in [that film]... And as we get towards the end of this movie, the chronology... Basically, we had to see that Mad Max was lurking around somewhere because we do know what happened. The writers know what happened to Mad Max in that year before, and we have a whole story of that, which I would like to do sometime if I get the chance."

The first interesting idea that comes to mind is that perhaps Furiosa's final stretch takes place a while after the main events of the movie. This isn't a big stretch, as the previews released so far confirmed the spinoff covers several years in the heroine's life. But of course, the biggest head-scratcher is that all the previous talk of a Fury Road follow-up, potentially subtitled The Wasteland, suggested it would be a sequel. It now sounds like Miller simply hadn't shared enough details for us to work out where everything stood.

There's also the (very real) possibility of the ideas floating around Miller and his collaborators' minds changing over the course of more than a decade. While it definitely sounds like he'd like to keep Max's legend going beyond Fury Road every time he speaks openly about the movie series, we can see the logic behind putting on the big screen all the stories developed around the Tom Hardy-led return first.

Actually, such a 'trilogy of sorts' would already be far more cohesive than anything that came before; the Mad Max saga's continuity has always been notoriously shaky, with diehard fans eventually embracing the 'legendary' nature of each chapter we've seen told so far on the big screen. In a way, Furiosa is the first project directly related to a previous entry.