8 Upcoming Movies That It's Actually Worth Getting Excited About

8. We Know George Miller Can Do Great Sequels - Mad Max: The Wasteland

In a summer dominated by mega-budget reboots and sequels of long-beloved movie franchises, the best film (at least live-action - if consider animation then Inside Out won by a country mile) came from a series that most of the multiplex audience wouldn't know from a Mad Magazine parody of that Thomas Hayden Church film about a bomb sniffing dog (too obscure?). Mad Max: Fury Road is a major accomplishment in action cinema as a narrative form, a two hour car chase where each beat tells you more about the characters, the plot and the desolation world. At Cannes, its inaugural press screening resulted in an unprecedented round of applause during the film (after the lengthy first action scene, culminating in the sandstorm). So who's excited for a sequel? Of course, the current state of movies has you be at best cautiously ambivalent about sequels to big successes; how much is the motivation really creative? But, hey, if George Miller can do it once, what's stop him repeating that magic? Nothing beyond some obvious casting (Tom Hardy will return) is known about Mad Max 5, tentatively subtitled The Wasteland (a moniker somehow even more obscure on plot details than Fury Road), with a release date still unspecified, although given the previous film's almost $400 million box office haul in the face of minimal mainstream brand recognition, you can bet Warner Bros. will be keen to get this one moving quickly (or at least quicker than Fury Road, which took seventeen years from conception to cinema). What's most interesting about the film is that Charlize Theron is attached as Furiosa. In and of itself not that surprising - for the longest time Miller has stated his original vision for more Max was told over two movies - but given how Fury Road ended, with the Imperator taking control of Immortan Joe's oasis as Max slinked off into the crowd, it doesn't quite make sense. Intriguing.