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Anyone familiar with Mel Gibson’s Mad Max trilogy knows the middle film, The Road Warrior, is the best of the three by any standard. The movie has some niggling issues, but the vehicular mayhem on display is unbeatable and the ending carries more emotional weight than almost any Tina Turner song could convey. By contrast, Mad Max is an energetic but cheap-looking movie and the less said about the neutered Beyond Thunderdome the better…

But why am I talking about the original trilogy when creator George Miller is planning to reboot the entire thing sometime soon with Mad Max: Fury Road? Because the fine folks over at Twitch are reporting that Miller is actually planning to shoot that film and a sequel back to back.

According to their source, Fury Road will be immediately followed by Furiosa. The former sounds like a muscle car while the latter hints at more of a sleek, Italian sports car doesn’t it? I have no idea what the hell “furiosa” means, if anything, and there’s been no confirmation on the news anyway so speculating on the title’s etymology is probably a bit premature. The first film hasn’t even begun shooting yet and no official start date has been announced.

Fury Road stars Tom Hardy (Bronson), Charlize Theron (my dreams), and Nicolas Hoult (About A Boy) but little is known of the storyline or relation the film holds to Gibson’s iconic character. A small amount of light was shed on the film at a recent press junket for Hardy’s newest film, Inception. Asked for plot information Hardy replied with the following… “It’s a relaunch and revisit to the world. An entire restructuring.  That’s not to say that it’s not picking up or leaving off from the Mad Max you know already, but it’s a nice re-take on the entire world using the same character, depositing him in the same world but bringing him up to date by 30 years.”

I’m not the only one unable to discern what exactly that means am I? The film was rumored to start production next month, but that date seems suspect as there’s yet to be an official announcement. Hardy’s reply to questions about it revealed that it’s still a matter of when, not if…

I can’t say when I’m going to be in front of the cameras. I’m actually headed tonight to Australia to start some stunt-training. I’m training now. I’m meant to drop 30 pounds so smoking and one meal a day is my training at the moment. I’m going to start fighting soon. The harder stuff, as we get close to the line. I’ll probably get three or four months of fight training out there… Shooting is probably nine months. Training is allocated as two months.  We don’t know if that’s going to push a little bit or come up a little bit. It’s a gray area. There’s very anomalies and shifting papers. All kinds of people’s shifting schedules, from what I’m aware, need to be tied down. The movie is absolutely healthy. It is going, it’s just a question of, not if,  when precisely.”

Are you excited for Fury Road?