Mad Max, Clipped, and the Funhouse Mirror of Recent History

If it helps, in dog years, 2014/15 was 60 years ago

Much bemoaning can be heard from the general direction of Hollywood these days about how poorly movies are performing at the box office. The bemoaning is repeated by journalists, endured by actors, and generally shrugged at by the general public. No matter how much Nicole Kidman may urge us, no one seems to feel any individual responsibility to go see a movie in theatres, or at least not enough someones to form a meaningful collective of moviegoers with open hearts and wallets.

Furiosa is the latest good movie with bad returns to feel the weight of the movie industry on its shoulders. Much money was spent on promoting this movie, a prequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth, upping the needed return on investment considerably. As of this writing, Furiosa has grossed $145 million globally, well under the $168 million it reportedly cost to make and well well under the cost the marketing likely incurred (Damian Lillard surely asked for a hefty sum to embarrass himself like that).

All of this is to say, this movie did not make the kind of box office returns that Hollywood clearly wanted it to. By releasing it during the hot hot hot Memorial Day slot, it could have joined such classics as Top Gun: Maverick (2022), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), and The Little Mermaid (2023), all of which represent a certain type of film that was released over Memorial Day weekend and grossed a lot of money. Those are the highest grossing movies released during that weekend in the modern era, all of which garnered over $100 million in that first weekend. Furiosa clocked in at $26 million. Those five movies, and most of the others on the full list, share some spiritual DNA. They are all big budget action movies, with the exception of Little Mermaid, but Disney’s built-in audience makes basically any movie they release in this window a safe bet. Furiosa seems, at first look, to be a good fit. It’s a movie with a lot of action in it, it co-stars a Hemsworth brother, and it is a new installment in a well-liked franchise. Based on those three points, all of which are indisputably true, it would make total sense to release it on Memorial Day weekend and expect it to make a lot of money.

But Americans/Hollywoodians are not universally blessed with an interest in the nuances of history. As I mentioned, Furiosa is a prequel to the 2015 box office flop Mad Max: Fury Road. Well, not a flop- it ended up making enough money internationally to cover costs- but it only grossed $45 million on its opening weekend, and cost a similar amount of money as Furiosa to make. The Mad Max franchise has produced box office hits before, but not in a good couple of decades. It is important to note that most people who love movies and almost all critics consider Fury Road to be one of the best movies of the 2010s, if not beyond. It is an incredible film and a masterpiece showcasing director George Miller’s particular style. I highly recommend it to everyone, as I think it is one of the most interesting films in a time when interesting films are not really getting made that much.

It is that particular style that I think is actually most germane to the point I’m fumbling around for. George Miller’s movies are weird as shit. Like, every single movie this man has ever made with the exception of Happy Feet (?) is kind of nuts. Nuts in a wonderful way, but watching these movies is not your average moviegoing experience. Fury Road’s color palette is extreme and its characters are grotesques. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world where people have not only reverted to their baser selves, they’ve also incorporated strange body modifications and unusual habits, belief systems, and fears into their daily existence. Some for instances to get my points across: wealthy characters drink breastmilk; a whole caste of death-chasing subservient foot soldiers worship cars and spray their mouths with silver paint right before any kamikaze act; the head warlord just like has a crazy-looking guy attached to the top of a modified truck playing a double neck guitar whenever he needs to go into battle; the head warlord is covered in sores and wears a clear suit of armor to protect them while also breathing through a Bane-esque facemask. The experience of watching a George Miller film is also unique. Cuts are jarring, with some action sped up and others slowed down for effect. Sound mixing also plays a large role in the experience of watching the film, alternating between very loud car chases and occasional moments of perfectly timed silence. Dialogue is minimal and vroom vroom noises are maximal.

Add all that to the fact that the last Mad Max movie was almost ten years ago (Miller has made one movie in between, 2022’s Three Thousand Years of Longing, but basically no one saw it besides critics, who liked it, as they usually do Miller’s work) and I would have approached the marketing of a movie like Furiosa with some trepidation. Miller is a lot of fun but he isn’t really accessible; once again: he’s really fucking weird. If you are already a fan of Miller’s work, especially his Mad Max saga, you’re going to want to see Furiosa, but if you aren’t, it requires some finesse to introduce you to his style. It’s already hard to get people in the theaters these days and it seems that people are less likely to take a chance on a wildcard. This is where I feel like the marketing around this movie totally failed; this movie was marketed far and wide, including memorably during NBA games. The Milwaukee Bucks’ Damian Lillard even did the aforementioned wry, stilted ad where he drove a Mad Max-esque jalopy in a neighborhood. Watching it, I wasn’t sure even Lillard had seen the movie he was promoting. Trailers for the movie followed this same pattern: marketing it as a big action movie starring a Hemsworth and an up-and-coming star in Anya Taylor-Joy. But the filmmaking alone is idiosyncratic enough that no trailer can make this look like just a straight-up action film. Even I, who have seen Fury Road multiple times, found the marketing jarring. One minute you’re watching basketball, the next minute a Hemsworth with a hot red beard is bellowing and Frankensteined cars are roaring and Anya is losing an arm, and what is this movie ABOUT?

If this had come out in 2017, I think this all would have worked. Fury Road was still in the conversation (lots of grad school philosophy bros made me watch it, for which I thank them) and The Hunger Games movies were everywhere during this era. Post-apocalyptic sagas were de rigueur in a way they really aren’t right now. Just ask Fallout, which it seems like no one watched. But the marketing around this movie revealed a sort of willful blindness. Mad Max is not The Fast and Furious franchise. These are incredible action movies and incredible car chase movies, but they aren’t standard summer blockbuster fare. Communicating their weirdness in an appealing way was important to drawing audiences in; I would imagine most people without a pre-existing relationship with the franchise just had no idea what this movie actually was and those with a pre-existing relationship haven’t been engaged in ten years. That’s an eon these days; action movies don’t look like this anymore. No movies look like this anymore.

All of this brings me to another piece of content I want to speak to, FX’s new drama Clipped. Clipped is the story of the Donald Sterling scandal during the 2013/14 NBA season, which broke during the Los Angeles’ Clippers second round playoff battle with the Golden State Warriors. Donald Sterling was, at the time, the owner of the LA Clippers basketball team and also a racist, old, pretty terrible man. His mistress and assistant, V. Stiviano, secretly recorded hundreds of hours of him saying racist things, then released those recordings to TMZ when he pissed her off. Clipped is about the fallout of the recordings coming out and one of the show’s strengths is in showing how much ten years ago feels both recent and incredibly antiquated. Ten years ago seems like it should feel recent, but watching V. follow 10-years ago Kim Kardashian’s antics or watching the way people just didn’t understand what virality meant made me feel like it was more like fifty years go.

It’s a new version of the uncanny, this ability to reexperience visually something you lived through and thought you remembered as present day. The world Clipped creates is indisputably a time I recently viewed as the present, but watching the show I can only notice the ways it feels like a time gone by. It is that bygone-ness that I think the Furiosa team forgot to take into account. Things feel so different so fast now and the visual language of that film has to be reintroduced anew to some of us and introduced for the first time to many, not just thrown up on the screen. Furiosa should exist; it is an excellent movie, but marketing departments would do well to take a (recent) history lesson or two. Maybe then people will actually fork over twenty bucks for your movie.