New Mad Max Film

IceDiver writes "According to Google News Mel Gibson has signed up for a new Mad Max film "Fury Road". His salary? A whopping $25,000,000.00 Apparently the script has been in the works for 3 years and is highly polished. As a big fan of all 3 Mad Max films, I am looking forward to this one! "

sheesh

[frieked]

and I thought he was too old for the last lethal weapon.

With that salary...

[jackb_guppy]

This film will be about as good as number 3. Which was about as good as WaterWorld.

The low budget Mad Max 1 & 2 were great, even though 2 was over dubbed in American.

they'll have some continuity issues, won't they?

[condour75]

I mean, weren't we supposed to expect the apocalypse to have happened by now already? Or is it like a James Bond or Superman thing, the old Umberto Eco concept of the Open Text. I dunno.

More apocalyptic blather?

[guacamolefoo]

I read about the movie this morning on CNN, but I wasn't really that excited by it. The interesting part of the story arc has been exhausted, IMHO. I'm not exactly sure where this one will go, unless it is a rehash of the last two plots.

1. Mad Max = world going to hell
2. Road Warrior = world gone to hell
3. Thunderdome = World gone to hell, but redeeming itself
4. New movie = (?) Make money!

There is some overlap (Road Warrior had an inkling of redemption at the end, but it was more explicit in Thunderdome.

This may end up being a good action flick, but I am not seeing significant potential to do anything very new or exciting. I expect that, like Mel, we'll find out that the series is old and tired.

guac-foo.

Re:profit ?

[On Lawn]

From an email I recieved this morning...

The trilogy of "Mad Max" pictures, for all their iconic value, amounted to a rather slender box office, grossing only $69 million in total domestically. That's partly because the 1979 original, released by Village Roadshow, Orion
Pictures and AIP, was hardly seen Stateside at all. The franchise only grew significant with "Mad Max: The Road Warrior."

Re:this can't be good

[dillon_rinker]

Watch the first three movies. The world ages...so do the characters. I see no paradox in revisiting the world after another 5-10 years and find that Max looks 15 years older. Youth and beauty can never beat old age and treachery, you know.

Re:I don't know

[stratjakt]

Here's how I understand the spinach thing:

Popeye was originally an adult comic strip, published for sailors out at sea. It was in something like stars and stripes, or whatever.

Anyways, he was a charicature of 'a sailor man', and would go ashore, get drunk, pick up hookers, swear constantly, and fight anyone who crossed his path.

Anyhow, kids would get ahold of the comic and start reading it. And, much like today (GTA3, etc) parents and do-gooders protested and whined. "Please think of the children".

So as a gag, EC Segar decided to mock all the whiners and put a 'kid friendly' message into one of the strips - he ate his spinach and then kicked everyones ass. It stuck.

It was a running gag to mock whiners. Eventually it became nothing more than a kids cartoon, but the spinach thing was already there.

Besides, he doesnt suck it through a pipe.

BTW, the "mexican loco weed" thing is an urban legend. It never happened.

Re:More apocalyptic blather?

[Telastyn]

Kinda like Harrison Ford and the "new" Indiana Jones movie? Or the Scooby Doo movie? Or the Star Wars prequels? Or...

Seems like alot of Movie Execs (read: tripe) have gone from rehashing old, moderately good films, into moderate films with different names and just went straight to remaking the same damned film, this time with nostalgia!

The last of the V8 Interceptors

[bmajik]

The Road Warrior was my favorite movie from the first time i saw it (at the tender age of 5) up until "The Devil's Advocate" came out.

Nobody in kindergarten knew what the hell i was talking about if i asked them if they needed a guy to haul this rig.

To this day, i still want the car he had in mad max. That supercharger (albeit fake) was the coolest thing i've ever seen. And i want a gear lever with a red button on it that makes the most glorious sound i've ever heard. I had a whole section on my website about the mad max car and some guy in .au emailed me about it with lots of details and info while i was in college. There are clone mad max cars up for auction from time to time. Hopefully, when im old and loaded, i'll be able to pick up a perfect replica mad-max car, with a _working_ super charger that somehow makes that incredible whine when i engage the supercharger.

I've actually asked a couple of tuners about that functionality, apparently it was pretty suspect. To run a boosted motor you need to run lower compression pistons to avoid predetonation, which means that when the SC was disengaged you'd be making shit for power , (although i guess technically you'd be using less gas, but the engine would be way less than optimally efficient). that makes it basically a tradeoff, theres probably some crossover point where you're actually getting better "bang for your gas" with the SC engaged than with it off.

Also, whowever invented the wrist-gauntlet mounted mini-crossbow is a diety.

Re:Let's see....

[ggruschow]

Sounds like it can't go wrong, right? Can you say The Phantom Menace?

Uh yeah. The Phantom Menace was a major flop [boxofficemojo.com] (where major flop is defined as the #3 highest grossing film so far [boxofficemojo.com].

Seriously. Who here didn't see it?

Now, I know you think it sucked, but I bet you went and saw Episode 2 as well, eh?

I was too young to see Mad Max 1-3 in theaters. I'll go and see this one so long as it's rated >40% on rottentomatoes.

Re:well, in that case

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason Mel Gibson looks old is because nearly every other Hollywood star of his magnitude even close to his age has had plastic surgery.

He looks normal for a 46-year old.

Re:Yay overrated actors

[kizarny]

I've worked in production offices for a few years and, while actors are getting some serious perks for "playing pretend", they also take the brunt of the blame if the movie goes over budget, hits delays or ultimately crashes and burns. I'm not saying that it's fair compensation but if I work on a string of movies that tank I still have a fairly easy time finding work on another one, not so with the face on the screen.

Branding

[Animats]

No actor is worth $25M. It's branding, not talent. I'm surprised that Hollywood hasn't figured out a way around that problem.

Some years ago, a friend of mine dragged me backstage at a major rock concert during setup, and I was hearing how the show had two sets of equipment and props, leap-frogging each other from city to city, with one group in setup while another was in teardown. I was talking to one of the promoter's financial people, and said, "So why not have two sets of musicians. Cats has two road companies. Barnum and Bailey Circus has two units. There have been rock groups where, over time, all the members of the band were replaced. And nobody can see those guys on stage (this was in a football stadium, and before big-screen projectors) anyway. Your costs will go up by only 20-30%, but revenue will double." He looked very thoughtful for a while.

Someday, Clear Channel will probably pull this off.

Re:The last of the V8 Interceptors

[Reziac]

Sorta sideways, but you point up why the Mad Max films WORKED: they were true to their own internal reality. The culture was bizarre, but it was believable in its own context, and the artifacts (such as the wrist-rocket style crossbow) were well-matched in that context. The vehicles are cool because they *feel* right, not just because they looked great.

Back when Thunderdome came out, there were dire predictions that it would be a terrible movie and how no way in hell could it live up to MM2, yadda yadda. Well, it was a different kind of movie (much as MM1 and MM2 are *very* different from one another), but it was true to its world. It *worked*. Gee, it wasn't a letdown after all.

So I'm inclined to give MM4 the benefit of the doubt.

The Feral Kid

[Anonymous Coward]

This blade covered boomerang weilding wild child was the best part of the entire series. The helicopter guy was ok but a little over the top. The Feral Kid was great. He was on the outside of what was left of civilization, like Max, and a survivor to the end. His look, his weaponry and his animal expressions and sounds were fantastic and creative. Making him the narrator of the "Road Warrior" was also a stroke of genius. The gay mohawked biker and Humongus v.s. Mel and the Feral Kid, what a line up!!!