Mad Max Timeline Explained: When Each Movie Takes Place
The Mad Max timeline can be difficult to decipher, largely because of the nearly twenty-year delay between the intended release of Mad Max: Fury Road and its actual release in 2015. The extended gap between the franchise’s third and fourth films, and the replacement of Mel Gibson with Tom Hardy in the role of Max Rockatansky, forced some retroactive changes to the overall canon that don’t quite fit with the original trilogy. However, acknowledging these inconsistencies, it’s still possible to map out a general timeline across the four Mad Max films, and the prequel film Furiosa.
The 2015 sequelMad Max: Fury Road changes the overarching storyline that was established by the original trilogy. The car models used in Fury Road are clearly contemporary with the film’s release, and this timeline is backed up by the prequel comics referencing real-life Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot, who served from 2013 to 2015. Likewise, this modern timeline, (which includes Anya Taylor-Joy's Furiosa), focuses more on general environmental abuse than the original Mad Max movies' oil-based apocalypse. It also doesn’t fit with the 1970s muscle cars of the first three films, or the written dates visible in the background of the first Mad Max, which place it somewhere in the mid-1980s. It also doesn’t explain how Fury Road’s Max is still so young.
Related: Mad Max: Why The Original Movie Is So Different To Fury Road
Series creator George Miller has addressed these retcons, saying that the original intention for the fourth film was to have Gibson return to play an old, grizzled Max. Instead, the version of Mad Max: Fury Road that was ultimately released to universal acclaim is sort of a reboot, sort of a sequel, and sort of a retelling. That
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