George Miller did 5 things to make Furiosa an essential prequel instead of a cash grab

polygon.com:

Making a Hollywood prequel is often seen as a studio grasping for profits or audience recognition, years after an initially successful project. There have been plenty of maligned examples over the years, like the threeStar Wars prequel films — which are now being reconsidered as enjoyable parts of a larger-than-ever galaxy — or Ridley Scott’s return to the Alien universe in Prometheus andAlien: Covenant.

The newest player in the ever-ongoing prequel IP landscape is Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which transports viewers back to George Miller’s Wasteland for the origin story of the titular young warrior, and her journey to becoming the fierce, fearsome Imperator we saw in Mad Max: Fury Road. The movie is a strange, successful journey through the Wasteland that earns its place as a necessary addition to the series — and to the small canon of Hollywood prequels that are worth your while. Let’s talk about why this prequel is valuable to fans, among so many that add little to nothing to a franchise.

Something that immediately marks Furiosa out from its fellow prequels is the fact that the story and screenplay were written before Fury Road even came out. “This movie was written when we were preparing Fury Road,” Miller explained at an early screening of the film in Los Angeles. “We realized that because that’s a story that basically happens over three days and two nights, all the content, all the subtext, all the exposition has to be done on the run. So in order to tell it cohesively, we had to know everything that happened before, so we wrote the story of Furiosa.”

The screenplay that became the final film was shared with all the creative team who worked on Fury Road, setting up a continuity that most prequels lack, as well as an origin story that was decisively connected to the film that came before it. That’s a far cry from most modern prequels, which are usually late-stage cash grabs. Furiosa was always part of the Fury Road world, and we see that in the way the world