George Miller’s anticipated sequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga has been confirmed as the opening film of the 77th Cannes Film Festival.
The Cannes premiere for the fifth instalment in the Mad Max franchise comes nine years after Warner Warner successfully launched Mad Max: Fury Road at Cannes in 2015.
The new instalment – starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth and Tom Burke – releases theatrically in France on May 22, two days ahead of its U.S. launch.
“The idea of this prequel has been with me for over a decade,” said Miller. “I couldn’t be more thrilled to return to the Festival de Cannes – along with Anya, Chris and Tom – to share Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. There is no better place than La Croisette to experience this film with audiences on the world stage.”
Miller was last in Cannes in 2022 with Three Thousand Years of Longing with Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, Out of Competition.
The festival paid tribute to the Mad Max franchise.
“Mad Max (1979), Mad Max II: The Challenge (1981), Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024): in 5 episodes and in almost 5 decades, George Miller has created a cathartic myth, even a cathartic mythology,” it wrote in its release.
Mad Max is a chronicle of societal and environmental collapse, playing with genre codes to question these themes, initially visionary and now cruelly topical. Originally filmed in the Australian Outback, this revisited “Western on wheels” describes a dystopian world where speed and movement are just as synonymous with life energy as with death as a result of resource depletion, offering the viewer a dose of adrenaline rarely equalled on the big screen.”