One fan theory suggests Fury Road takes place between the original The Road Warrior, which explains the title character’s transformation between movies. Released in 1979, the original Mad Max is a dark revenge story that sees Mel Gibson’s rookie cop lose his wife, his child, and eventually his mind. The low-budget thriller pits him against a gang of murderous bikers who Max picks off one-by-one after they kill his family.
Introduced as a likable young police officer, Max Rockatansky gradually unravels throughout the movie. Set in the Straw Dogs. Understandably, some fans of the movie were surprised when the first sequel, The Road Warrior, jumped ahead to the post-apocalyptic future and turned the title character into an almost mythic wandering warrior of the wasteland.
One fan theory proposes this character shift occurs during 2015’s belated series entry Fury Road, with the movie being an “interquel” that takes place between the original Mad Max and its first sequel The Road Warrior. According to this theory, Fury Road makes sense of Max’s dramatic character transformation despite barely focusing on the character himself. In Fury Road, Max is jittery, barely coherent, and plagued by visions of his wife and child, while future spinoff star Furiosa is the competent, ruthless mercenary who guides the mission to save Immortan Joe’s captives. Per this theory, it is the brutal adventure of Fury Road and seeing Furiosa’s unlikely success, that emboldens Max and makes him the wizened, self-sufficient (but still deeply traumatized) wanderer seen in The Road Warrior, as opposed to the hopeless antihero of the original Mad Max.
By the time the second sequel Beyond Thunderdome comes around, Mad Max is a moral arbiter who can call out Aunt Entity’s brutality toward the defenseless non-villain Blaster, with Thunderdome representing the end of his character arc. This is only one reading of the franchise’s chronology, and series creator George Miller has said “I can’t even work out the chronology of the first, second and third, let alone the fourth,” so there’s a chance the movies don’t take place in this order. Miller has played somewhat loose with the timeline throughout the series, so there's a chance Fury Road comes second in the order of the movies.
When tracked according to this reading, Max goes from the naive, kindhearted cop of Mad Max to the dangerously unstable antihero in Fury Road, to the more levelheaded but still merciless protagonist of The Road Warrior and eventually circles back to being a force of decency in Beyond Thunderdome. As with everyone in the franchise’s wasteland setting, he still has plenty of blood on his hands. However, Max still proves he can hold onto his humanity in the face of societal collapse, and it is bearing witness to Furiosa’s Fury Road story that makes the hero of Mad Max able to face himself again. While not necessarily canon, it is a convincing of Max Rockatansky's changing outlook on the wasteland between outings.
