The Mad Max timeline can be difficult to decipher, largely because of the nearly twenty-year delay between the intended release of Mad Max: Fury Road and its actual release in 2015. The extended gap between the franchise’s third and fourth films, and the replacement of Mel Gibson with Tom Hardy in the role of Max Rockatansky, forced some retroactive changes to the overall canon that don’t quite fit with the original trilogy. However, acknowledging these inconsistencies, it’s still possible to map out a general timeline across the four Mad Max films, and the prequel film Furiosa.
The 2015 sequel Mad Max: Fury Road changes the overarching storyline that was established by the original trilogy. The car models used in Fury Road are clearly contemporary with the film’s release, and this timeline is backed up by the prequel comics referencing real-life Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot, who served from 2013 to 2015. Likewise, this modern timeline, (which includes Anya Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa), focuses more on general environmental abuse than the original Mad Max movies’ oil-based apocalypse. It also doesn’t fit with the 1970s muscle cars of the first three films, or the written dates visible in the background of the first Mad Max, which place it somewhere in the mid-1980s. It also doesn’t explain how Fury Road’s Max is still so young.
Series creator George Miller has addressed these retcons, saying that the original intention for the fourth film was to have Gibson return to play an old, grizzled Max. Instead, the version of Mad Max: Fury Road that was ultimately released to universal acclaim is sort of a reboot, sort of a sequel, and sort of a retelling. That ambiguous status turns the whole Mad Max story into more of a legend than a strict, linear story. Looked at this way, a Mad Max timeline can be created across all four Mad Max movies by looking at each in turn, and taking into account the recent changes that have been made.
Mad Max
The original Mad Max, which released in 1979, opens with the caption, “A few years from now.” That, and a piece of graffiti on a road sign in one scene dated December 1984, puts the events of the first film squarely in the mid-‘80s, most likely 1985. At the time the story starts, Australia — along with the rest of the world — has been thrown into a social and economic breakdown as a result of warring around the Persian Gulf, which causes a dramatic drop-off in oil production. The lack of fuel sparks a global financial collapse, with various countries declaring martial law to keep order.
In this timeline, violent road gangs have taken over the highways of Australia, only kept in check by the officers of the MFP (Main Force Patrol), which includes a young “Mad” Max Rockatansky. Over the course of Mad Max, the young officer’s wife and child are brutally murdered by one of these road gangs, sending him on a mission of vengeance; he hunts down each member in his trademark interceptor, and kills them one by one. By the film’s end, it’s clear that the world is in rough shape, but a semblance of order still exists. At the very least, a visible divide remains between the wasteland and what remains of civilization.
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior takes place about three years after the end of Mad Max, setting it in the late 1980s. This is where Miller’s retcons start to get a bit confusing. In the original timeline, The Road Warrior‘s story precedes the eventual global nuclear war, and the wasteland as shown in the movie is just the result of further decay and societal breakdown, not the aftermath of nuclear winter. In the Mad Max: Fury Road prequel comics, however, this is changed, and the nuclear war takes place between the first and second films.
Regardless of the timeline, the effect is the same: society has continued to break down significantly in just a few short years since the end of Mad Max, especially in the Australian wasteland where Max now lives and travels around in his interceptor searching for gasoline.
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
The third Mad Max movie, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome takes place about 15 years after the end of The Road Warrior. This is evidenced by a marking near the crashed airplane where the Lost Tribe takes Max, which denotes that the plane’s pilot, Captain Walker, left to seek help in 1999. Seeing as how Walker has been gone for at least a few years, and that The Road Warrior takes place around 1988, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome marks the longest stretch between films in the series so far.
Of course, this timeline becomes problematic retroactively because of Mad Max: Fury Road. Beyond Thunderdome takes place well after the nuclear war, regardless of which timeline is being used, but the prequel comics show that in the new timeline, that war didn’t happen until after 2015. This is a clear contradiction with the 1999 date shown in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
Either way, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome‘s story is clearly set well after the nuclear apocalypse. Bartertown represents the first real instance of an attempted rebuilt society post-collapse, with a general outline of laws, commerce, and social hierarchy. This structure goes beyond the simple gangs and survivor groups shown in The Road Warrior, and it fits with the new, post-apocalyptic social order shown in Mad Max: Fury Road.
Mad Max: Fury Road
As previously mentioned, Mad Max: Fury Road is difficult to situate exactly in the context of the original trilogy. It’s clear that the movie takes place after the events of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, according to the prequel comics. It’s also clear from the appearance and behavior of Hardy’s Max in Fury Road that at least some notable time has passed, as he is even more primal, silent and animalistic than he is at the end of the third movie. Given a few references to the amount of time since the war, and the real-life references in the comics, the fourth film likely takes place around 2050.
However, the chronology does not line up. Even if the dates and car models from Mad Max are ignored, as they seem to be in the comics, and it’s assumed that the events of those movies all still took place as they did, just 30 or 40 years later, it still doesn’t quite work. Max still appears to be in his 30s in Mad Max: Fury Road, even though he would have had to be at least forty in Beyond Thunderdome. Plus, in Mad Max’s Fury Road introduction, he sports a new tattoo marking 12,045 days (or exactly 33 years) since the “fall” – presumably the apocalypse. This means that Tom Hardy’s Max would have barely been born at the time of the societal collapse, which directly contradicts the first Mad Max.
Accepting Mad Max as more of a myth is the easiest way to reconcile these contradictions, but fans have proposed some interesting theories, too. Some suggest Gibson and Hardy’s Mad Max characters are completely different people, and that the titles of “Mad Max” and “Road Warrior” were passed from one to the other at some point in time. This is supported by the fact that Max has a son in the first movie, while the flashbacks in Fury Road show a little girl. A few fans have even gone so far as to theorize that Hardy’s Max is the feral, boomerang-throwing boy from The Road Warrior. With Mad Max director George Miller himself admittedly unclear on all the details of the franchise’s timeline, a truly concrete answer is likely impossible. But the open nature of the series lore makes it ripe for speculation, and for the potential for more stories to come.
How Furiosa Fits Into The Mad Max Timeline
The next story in the Mad Max franchise will actually take a step back in the overall timeline. Following the backstory of Charlize Theron’s character, Furiosa will be a prequel set before she became an Imperator for Immortan Joe. As with the other Mad Max movies, it’s hard to pin down when exactly Furiosa takes place (and story details for the film are scarce), but George Miller has said that it will span many years, as opposed to the few action-packed days that Mad Max: Fury Road explores. Given that Anya Taylor-Joy, who will play the eponymous protagonist in Furiosa, is 20 years younger than Charlize Theron, the Mad Max: Fury Road prequel Furiosa could be set as early as 2030 in parts, or even earlier given that Taylor-Joy could convincingly play down in age. In any case, the vast majority of the film’s placement along the Mad Max timeline should be before Mad Max: Fury Road and well after Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Furiosa is currently set to release on May 24, 2024.
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