8 Popular Fan Theories That Completely Ignore The Movie They're About

4. The Road Warrior Explicitly Tells Us The Feral Child Doesn't Grow Up To Be Tom Hardy's Mad Max

Two massive 2015 movies were saddled with an irritating fan theory that suggested their hero was actually a grown-up version of a character from earlier in the series. And while the Jurassic World one (Owen is the guy Alan Grant mentally scars at the start of the first movie) has a sliver of believability to it (well, until Chris Pratt came out and disproved it), the Mad Max: Fury Road one should never have got beyond the "wouldn't it be cool if...?" stage.

The basic idea is that Tom Hardy's "Max" isn't the same character as Mel Gibson's Mad Mr. Rockatansky from the original movies, but is instead the Feral Child from The Road Warrior. There were lots of little pieces of evidence that suggested this, including the character's movie-long reluctance to reveal his name, the presence of the first sequel's music box and the general degradation of the world into an even more hellish desert while the hero had stayed the same age. How else can you have things work?

OK, so it's a cool concept that advances the idea of the Mad Max character, turning him even more into a nameless nomad of the Wasteland, but it totally ignores everything we know about the Feral Child; at the end of The Road Warrior it's revealed he became the leader of the film's oil-hoarding tribe.