Each Mad Max movie has its unique appeal, but which installment of the sci-fi action thriller franchise has the highest body count of the series so far? Beginning in 1979 with Babe: Pig in the City director George Miller’s sparse, brutal Mad Max, the dystopian sci-fi series Mad Max could not be less like that later, more family-friendly film from its helmer.
The original Mad Max is a meditatively-paced thriller that sees Mel Gibson’s rookie cop strain to maintain law and order until his family is struck by tragedy and he is sent on a bloody quest for revenge. With Mad Max’s wife and child dead, the unsigned officer cuts a bloody swathe through the biker gang responsible during the movie’s bloody final act. By the time the first sequel, begins, the apocalypse has occurred onscreen and Max is a drifter.
His ensuing adventures throughout The Road Warrior, Beyond Thunderdome, and 2015’s acclaimed Fury Road might be more fantastical than the surprisingly bleak original Mad Max, but each movie still sees the title character off a significant number of villains. Although the original Mad Max is the darkest and most grounded movie in the series, the installment with the highest body count is actually Fury Road by quite a considerable stretch thanks to the disposable henchmen the War Boys, and their doomed leader Immortan Joe. The first sequel The Road Warrior is the only movie that can come close to contesting Fury Road’s grisly record, with Max racking up a considerable number of victims among Lord Humungus’ similarly faceless minions, the Marauders. For comparison, The Road Warrior boasts 51 onscreen deaths thanks to its slew of gnarly car crashes, while Fury Road has a record-setting 75.
In contrast, the lower-budget original movie Mad Max boasts only 13 onscreen deaths (14 if you count Max’s dog), and the softer sequel Beyond Thunderdome has only 11. This is mostly because Tina Turner’s Aunt Entity is the most level-headed of Max’s antagonists, whereas the lower number of deaths in the original Mad Max, like the movie’s future setting, is likely a question of budget. With such a paltry amount of money available to the filmmakers, it is impressive that the original movie managed to pull off 13 deaths, and almost all of them are memorable moments that make the most of Mad Max’s limited scope.
In contrast, both The Road Warrior and Fury Road’s far higher body counts betray the ambitions of the comparably slow, subdued original movie. While the original movie might be a simple story of revenge, its fast-paced action sequences, sparse dialogue, and numerous then-shocking grisly moments of gore made Mad Max a cult classic and ensured that Miller could stage more impressive, propulsive action sequences with far bigger body counts in subsequent sequels. The divisive Beyond Thunderdome may have bucked the trend but for the most part, the Mad Max movies have tried to consistently up the ante of their violent, bone-and-car-crunching action by increasing the number of onscreen casualties, the speed of the vehicles, and the impact of the mile-a-minute chases.
