Immortan Joe was a perfect, timely villain for Mad Max: Fury Road, but should not be the antagonist of Furiosa’s upcoming spinoff movie for numerous reasons. Released in 1979, the original Mad Max was an unexpectedly huge success for director George Miller. Once the most profitable movie of all time, the cheaply-produced Australian exploitation thriller went on to spawn an entire franchise that came to define the pre-eminent aesthetic of post-apocalyptic sci-fi cinema for decades to come.
The original Mad Max was a sparse, brutal story of revenge that barely utilized its futuristic setting, but the movie’s sequels soon used their bigger budgets to envision ever-more expansive and chilling visions of the future. Both The Road Warrior and Fury Road, for instance, depicted Max’s world as a wasteland where survivors split into tribal factions and fought over access to resources. This grim image of environmental devastation provides a thematic thorough line for the Mad Max movies, whose chronology is otherwise fairly murky.
In an exciting development for fans of the franchise, Mad Max: Fury Road heroine Furiosa is soon to get a spinoff movie of her own, and Miller has promised that the upcoming outing will be an epic story spanning decades. This sort of scope is unheard of in the Mad Max universe, whose self-contained outings have until now been fast-paced action movies that take place over a few days, and the change in approach has led some fans to speculate that this upcoming spinoff might finally shed some light on how the offscreen apocalypse occurred in the world of the franchise. Regardless of its bigger scale, though, Furiosa’s Mad Max spinoff movie must prioritize the character herself and illuminating her story, which means the outing needs to avoid depicting her Fury Road nemesis, Immortan Joe. Recreating the iconic character via CGI is unlikely to be effective, his original actor, unfortunately, passed away, and focusing on Immortan Joe would pull focus from Furiosa, all of which are good reasons to untangle the pair’s plots in the Mad Max spinoff.
Furiosa’s Spinoff Is Her Story
The upcoming Furiosa spinoff movie is not the character’s first canon backstory, but it could be the first one that the Mad Max franchise’s fandom is happy with. Furiosa’s tie-in prequel comic badly mishandled her character by only showing her past as it related to Immortan Joe and his many misdeeds. Not only did this fill Furiosa’s prequel comics with gratuitous assault scenes, but it also meant readers never got a sense of Furiosa herself and her story, something that the spinoff needs to focus on. Furiosa was a compelling protagonist in Fury Road because her mission to save Immortan Joe’s captives from slavery was an involving one, much like Max is a perfect protagonist for The Road Warrior because the drifter’s decision to help out survivors makes viewers root for him to succeed.
However, Max already had a tragic canon backstory thanks to 1979’s original movie, which saw him turn from a kind-hearted family man into a cold-blooded killer when Toecutter’s gang ruined his life by killing his family. As a result, by the time the sequel rolled around, he was a rounded character the audience cared about, something that can be achieved again with Furiosa’s spinoff copying the original Mad Max. This would mean jettisoning Immortan Joe who, since he is canonically a former general that rose to power after the apocalypse, had no place in Furiosa’s peaceful pre-war life, the part of her story that viewers still haven’t seen and deserved a long-awaited look into.
Immortan Joe’s Actor Passed Away
As both the original Mad Max’s Toecutter and Fury Road’s Immortan Joe, character actor Hugh Keays-Byrne gave a pair of instantly iconic sci-fi villain turns that couldn’t be recast in a sequel, prequel, or spin-off. The actor passed away last year and the character should be retired as a result, giving Furiosa the chance to branch out and experience her own story in the prequel. Both Immortan Joe and Mad Max’s original villain were terrifying, believable villains with well-rounded motives who were made much more memorable by Keays-Byrne’s idiosyncratic acting choices, like changing Toecutter’s accent from scene to scene to underline his erratic nature. Few actors could hope to replace the screen veteran, and Immortan Joe’s story has already been effectively immortalized onscreen in Fury Road’s action.
De-aging Immortan Joe Wouldn’t Work
While Keays-Byrne’s passing would ordinarily mean the actor could not possibly appear in Furiosa’s spinoff, the groundbreaking work being done by computer effects artists means a (likely dialogue-free) cameo via CGI isn’t outside the realm of possibility. However, Miller already noted that he did not want Charlize Theron reprising her role as Furiosa because he was worried about the uncanny valley seen in The Irishman’s de-aging CGI, so using CGI to recreate Fury Road’s villain would be an insult to fans after this justification of the spinoff’s recasting. Miller is likely right since much of The Irishman’s sizable budget was spent on CGI the director found unconvincing while Furiosa’s spinoff will need most of its budget to be allocated to action sequences, meaning the quality of effects that the production could afford would likely be less impressive than Scorsese’s movie. As a result, this means the movie has more reason not to use a CGI recreation of Immortan Joe since not only is there no need for the character to appear, but the means required to bring about such a cameo would be an expensive, unnecessary addition to an already ambitious production.
There are a lot of avenues for Furiosa’s story to explore. Revisiting The Road Warrior’s cut twist would let the spinoff comment on the abuse of authority in a crumbling society, and depicting Furiosa’s happier pre-apocalypse life could humanize a character who until now has only been seen as tough and wizened. That said, bringing back Fury Road villain Immortan Joe for an appearance in Furiosa’s Mad Max spinoff movie would be a step back for the series and an expensive mistake due to the passing of his original actor, the unique and irreplaceable nature of his performance, and the outing’s opportunity to explore hitherto-unseen elements of the franchise’s universe.
