Every day is a lovely day for more Mad Max: Fury Road, but a sequel isn’t coming for a while, if at all. Director George Miller is engaged in an ugly court battle with Warner Bros. over unpaid earnings for his 2015 Best Picture nominee. “The director’s production company, Kennedy Miller Mitchell, has claimed in a document… that the studio acted in a ‘high-handed, insulting, or reprehensible’ manner,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald. “And by ‘destroying’ the relationship of trust by allegedly refusing to pay a bonus for delivering the movie under budget and breaching a co-financing agreement, they were unable to work together to make any further installments.”
The production company has claimed Fury Road cost $154.6 million; the studio claimed it blew out to $185.1 million. Warner Bros alleged that instead of a 120-minute movie that was rated R in the United States… the contract required the company to make a 100-minute movie that was rated no harder than PG-13. (Via)
Miller wants to make at least two more Mad Max movies, one of which is tentatively titled Mad Max: The Wasteland (there’s also been talk of a Furiosa spinoff), and his Fury Road star, Charlize Theron, is interested in coming back.
“I love that character, I loved working with George Miller, and if he was ever on board, yeah. I mean, I would be in right from the beginning,” she told ScreenRant. “With him, it’s kind of like working with Jason Reitman. I wouldn’t even need to see a script, I trust him that much and it’s great when you have that with a filmmaker.” If anyone can settle a bitter dispute, like the one currently brewing between Miller and Warner Bros., it’s Imperator Furiosa.
(Via Sydney Morning Herald and ScreenRant)
