Where does Furiosa fit into the Mad Max timeline? George Miller says it doesn’t matter

polygon.com:

Continuity in the Mad Max movie series is pretty confusing. It might be hard to believe, but the 40-year-old franchise spawned from a micro-budget Australian movie about raiders in a post-apocalyptic wasteland doesn’t actually have the most coherent timeline. Furiosa, the full-speed-ahead latest film in the series, doesn’t clear anything up, although it does have a specific timeline connection to its predecessor, Mad Max: Fury Road. But we’ll do our best to help you understand it.

The first important thing to remember about Mad Max’s timeline is that it kind-of-sort-of got rebooted. Fury Road, the fourth installment in the series, was originally planned for production in the ’90s or early 2000s, with Mel Gibson returning to his central role as roving loner Max. However, after numerous delays, and numerous instances of Mel Gibson being a horrible person in public, the movie got an updated script and a new Max — the much younger Tom Hardy.

With the change in actors and in Max’s apparent age, the series had to be changed slightly, too. So Fury Road is essentially set in an alternate timeline from the original movies, where key events happen at slightly different times. In Fury Road’s timeline, the nuclear annihilation of huge portions of humanity happened between the events of Mad Max and The Road Warrior, rather than after The Road Warrior, like they do in the original trilogy.

This feels especially confusing given that Furiosa’s first trailer says the movie takes place 45 years after “the Collapse.” Technically, this means the movie probably takes place a little less than 45 years after the events of The Road Warrior. This doesn’t make a ton of sense when compared to the events of Fury Road, especially if it’s the same Max character.

But if you’re trying to square that math either with the events of the original Mad Max trilogy or with Fury Road, let me offer some helpful advice: Don’t. It probably doesn’t make sense. In fact, the comic books that came out since Fu