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Furiosa 2024 entered theaters earlier this week, and it has a surprise that foreshadows the Mad Max Saga's future. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the fifth installment in the tale and picks up 45 years after the events of the first Mad Max movie. It stars Charlize Theron, Anna-Taylor Joy, and Alyla Browne as the titular Furiosa and comes from the mind of Australian auteur George Miller.
Disclaimer: The article may contain spoilers for Furiosa. Reader's discretion is advised.
The two-hour and twenty-eight-minute movie entails the story of Furiosa's revenge. The main antagonist, played by Chris Hemsworth, is named Dementus, and he also happens to be the man who killed Furiosa's mother and abducted her from her home when she was just a little girl.
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The cherry on this epic ice cream was a fleeting cameo in Furiosa 2024 trailer, which has fans buzzing. This would be the dramatic appearance of Max Rockatansky, the madman himself.
All of George Miller's Mad Max movies up to this point, from the 1979 debut to the highly praised Fury Road (2015), have centered around the post-apocalyptic exploits of the titular “Mad Max,” initially portrayed by Mel Gibson and subsequently by Tom Hardy.
Though Furiosa 2024 doesn't follow this blueprint and instead throws Ana Taylor-Joy with 30 lines of dialogue into the action epic and tells the backstory of Imperator Furiosa, it still feeds fans with an end credit scene first in the franchise and the above-mentioned Max cameo. Read on to find out more.
Furiosa 2024 brings Mad Max back
Fans witness Anya Taylor-Joy's heroine and her comrade Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) engaging in a bloody road fight with attackers working for Warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), midway through Furiosa 2024, in a section the movie calls "Stowaways to Nowhere."
The two attempt to flee their life of suffering and make their way to Furiosa's home, the Green Place. The protagonist still has a map on her arm called the star map. Regretfully, Dementus kidnaps them en route, torturing and killing Jack before hanging Furiosa by her left arm—the one on which she bears the map.
Unfortunately, her sole means of escape is to chop off her own arm, literally leaving the route to her home hanging. This is how Furisoa loses her arm in the film. After this, The Imperator tries to return to the Citadel, as she's bleeding out.
Furisoa faints as she reaches the Citadel due to blood loss. But this is right next to an enigmatic man who is idly lounging next to a black V8 Interceptor and has on a brown leather jacket. Standing with his back turned in the scene, fans never see this man's face.
We might not have to say this as Max is as iconic as Uncle Sam himself, but as confirmed by Miller himself in previous interviews with Screen Rant and Entertainment Weekly, this is none other than former Main Force Patrol officer Max Rockatansky, here played by Hardy's stunt double Jacob Tomuri.
He appears to be the one who brings an unconscious Furiosa back to the Citadel, where the people on the lower floors tend to her until she recovers. Max is then seen watching the Citadel from afar, again with his back turned to the camera. Miller, in the previously alluded-to interviews, says the following:
"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 [Furiosa 2024]. 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."
Given that "Beyond Thunderdome" is set in the early years of the 2000s and "Fury Road" picks up several decades after the conclusion of Thunderdome, it's reasonable to assume that the cameo scene occurs in between Beyond Thunderdome and Mad Fury Road, the third and fourth films in the franchise, respectively.
The attire of Mad Max is fit for this period that Furiosa 2024 is set in as well, and keen-eyed viewers may have also noticed the similarities between this appearance of Max in the film and the opening scene of Fury Road, albeit a food plate.
Max doesn't make any further cameos in Furiosa 2024 itself; however, he does show up in the end credits sequence, which offers footage from various well-known Hardy sequences from Mad Max: Fury Road.
Given the ambiguity with which the Furisoa 2024 post-credits sequence tries to allude to the future of the franchise, it is uncertain where the Saga will go from here.
According to Geroge Miller, there is a script for a second Mad Max prequel that centers on Max's life in the year before the movie and his appearance in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Regardless, all one can do is wait, and while they do, they can catch Fursioa 2024 now in theaters. Pitting Anna Taylor-Joy (Last Night in Soho) and Chris Hemsworth (Thor) against each other in the world of George Miller, the epic tells the story of Imperator Furiosa.
