Veteran director George Miller’s Mad Max series is one of action cinema’s most beloved institutions, but is there a different film that secretly shares the same fictional universe? Released in 1979, the original Mad Max was vastly different from the sequels that followed in its footsteps. A stripped-back star vehicle for the future director of Apocalypto, the original Mad Max was a psychological thriller that followed a typically intense Mel Gibson as the titular character, a police officer living in an Australian city who gradually grows more unhinged and merciless in his pursuit of a criminal gang who attacked his family.
The raw, brutal original is a masterpiece of sparse thriller cinema, so it came as a surprise for viewers when Mad Max’s subsequent sequels took place in an over-the-top post-apocalyptic future, one filled with campy villains and high-octane car chases. From 1981’s The Road Warrior through to 2015’s critically acclaimed Fury Road (which saw Tom Hardy take over the title role), the Mad Max series has interrogated everything from environmentalism to misogyny, to fundamentalism without ever sacrificing its mile-a-minute pace.
But could there be a secret fifth film in the Mad Max universe? There is a standalone prequel starring Anya Taylor-Joy as a younger version of Fury Road’s hardass heroine Furiosa on the way, and Miller is hard at work on the franchise’s fifth installment, The Wasteland. But The Truman Show director/fellow Australian filmmaker Peter Weir’s oddball 1974 horror-comedy The Cars That Ate Paris seems like such an obvious influence on Mad Max’s post-apocalyptic landscape that one theory posits there is a chance the movie is set in the same fictional universe as Miller’s action series. It’s a daring claim to make when Weir’s film predates the Mad Max cinematic universe, but the themes that overlap between the movies and their similar settings make this a hard idea to dismiss entirely.
The Theory
Like Mad Max, The Cars That Ate Paris is a low-budget Australian production from the 70s, and like Mad Max (the original movie, at least) it is set in an Australia that is, if not post-apocalyptic, certainly on the brink of social upheaval. However, this alone isn’t noteworthy. The 70s were a golden age for so-called ‘Ozploitation,’ and everything from Walkabout, to Wake In Fright, to the later Razorback made great use of the country’s otherworldly, deserted settings to locate their strange, often haunting stories. But there’s more to the comparisons between the two movies in question. Like Mad Max, the story of Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris centers around characters on the fringe of normal society who eke out a morally questionable existence by souping up cars to be killing machines.
But the connection goes deeper than that again. Weir’s movie (which is something of an anomaly in his canon, with most of his output being character dramas such as the superb Dead Poet’s Society) also depicts a self-contained society remarkably similar to those seen in the Mad Max franchise. ittedly, the mild-mannered protagonist of The Cars That Ate Paris (who went on to play Napoleon in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) is far more meek and nebbish than the unrelenting force of nature that Mad Max becomes over throughout the first film. But the setting he ends up stranded in, the titular town of Paris, has an entire economy based around intentionally causing car accidents for outsiders, stripping their cars for parts, and abducting or killing survivors, and it’s hard to claim that this doesn’t call to mind both Immortan Joe’s brutal dictatorship in Fury Road and the earlier Mad Max franchise setting of Bartertown.
Further Evidence For the Mad Max/ Cars That Paris Connection
The twisted plot and themes of The Cars That Ate Paris, regardless of its less intense tone, could explain how Mad Max’s various post-apocalyptic societies came to be. The use of vehicles for protection, isolation, and eventual pseudo-currency crops up in every Mad Max movie throughout the series. By the time viewers meet Max in The Road Warrior, he is a far cry from the police officer of the first film, but The Cars That Ate Paris depicts a small community gradually changing its worldview until murderous antics are not only acceptable but the backbone of the town’s business, meaning the likes of Max had to adapt to survive. While the original Mad Max showed viewers what a slow burn apocalypse looks like in the city as societal bonds break down, The Cars That Ate Paris could be seen to do the same for a rural, less populated side of the same nation.
Why It Might Not Be True
While there are a surprising amount of similarities between both movies, Weir’s movie does predate Miller’s by a few years, and despite their similarities, The Cars That Ate Paris and the Mad Max movies have vastly different tones. Not only that, but Miller has never mentioned the crossover, and the crime-ridden setting of the original Mad Max is a far cry from the rural (seeming) idyll of Paris. That said, Miller has also itted that other Mad Max theories hadn’t occurred to him, and the comparative quietness of Paris could be ed for by the cultural difference between cities and small towns. It's not a sure thing by any means, but there are plenty of similarities between the movies and even if they're unintentional, there's no reason that fans couldn't conclude that they share a universe even if it's never made explicit by their creators.
How This Affects The Mad Max Series
It may seem like sharing continuity with an obscure horror movie from the 70s would have little impact on future Mad Max movies. But with the Furiosa prequel on the way and The Wasteland (hopefully, eventually) coming out, it’s clear that Miller wants to offer more explanation for the societal breakdown and social atomization of the Mad Max universe, and the cultural horror of Paris offers a clever and (surprisingly, for a 1974 movie) timely explanation. Weir’s movie doesn’t depict an entire nation or world in free fall but instead offers a creepy vision of a small town becoming so self-sufficient that it’s actively hostile to outsiders, just like Bartertown and the Citadel would later be in the Mad Max canon. It’s impossible to know for certain unless one of the directors in question decides to comment, but for now, it’s hard to deny the logic of The Cars That Ate Paris possibly residing in the same gasoline-stained world as the Mad Max movies.
