Warner Bros. has been the home of Mad Max for over four decades, but it looks like the Wasteland is up for grabs.
According to Puck‘s Matthew Belloni, George Miller was recently in Hollywood meeting with studios about a new Mad Max movie, with Amazon, Universal, and Sony Pictures all said to be interested.
Per Belloni’s source, the 81-year-old Miller’s pitch is essentially an exit plan: one final Mad Max film, followed by a TV series, and then a sale of the entire property to the highest bidder.
The eyebrow-raiser? Warner Bros. — which has distributed all five previous Mad Max movies — isn’t in the mix. Belloni reports Miller visited the Burbank lot, but both WB’s film and TV divisions passed.
Why would WB pass?
On paper, this looks insane. Mad Max: Fury Road won six Oscars and is widely considered one of the greatest action movies ever made. So why would Warner Bros. walk away?
Start with Furiosa. The 2024 prequel grossed just $174 million worldwide against a budget reported around $168 million, meaning it likely lost a significant amount once marketing is factored in.
Fury Road itself was no slam dunk either, grossing $380 million on a budget north of $150 million. Miller makes masterpieces, but he makes expensive ones, and the box office math has been getting worse, not better.
Coming off a money-loser, another $150 million-plus trip to the Wasteland is a hard sell for any studio accountant, let alone the one that just ate the loss.
There’s also worth keeping in mind that Warner Bros. Discovery is in the middle of being absorbed into Paramount Skydance, something we’ve been covering extensively.
Belloni doesn’t connect the dots, and the Furiosa numbers alone are reason enough to pass, but a studio in deal limbo isn’t exactly in a position to be making big, risky franchise commitments before the new regime takes over.
Whether that factored into the decision is anyone’s guess, but the timing is what it is.
The George Lucas playbook
The more interesting wrinkle is Miller’s reported plan: movie, TV series, then sell the whole franchise.
That’s the George Lucas playbook: build out the property’s value, then cash out. Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney for $4 billion in 2012; Miller, at 81, appears to be eyeing a similar endgame for the Wasteland.
Miller has long talked about Mad Max: The Wasteland, the follow-up that would bring Tom Hardy’s Max back, so it’s a safe bet that’s the “one last movie” being shopped.
Whether Amazon, Universal, or Sony is willing to pay Miller prices for a franchise coming off a money-loser is the real question.
For Amazon — which already owns MGM and took creative control of James Bond — adding Mad Max would be another legacy action franchise in the stable, with Prime Video as a built-in home for the TV series.
The irony is hard to miss either way: the studio that rode shotgun with Max since 1979 may end up watching the keys to the Interceptor get handed to someone else.
