Mad Max: Fury Road Scenes We Never Got To See

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Mad Max: Fury Road was one of the best movies of 2015 — and possibly every year before and after that, too. The high-octane action film is a feat of filmmaking, with writer-director George Miller turning what is basically a two-hour-long car chase into a truly riveting cinematic study of classism, environmental degradation, misogyny, tyranny, alliances, grief, and the human condition. With wildly original characters, punishing landscapes, and deadly consequences at every turn, the movie makes use of every single second of its runtime and leaves audiences thirsty for more.

But according to lead actress Charlize Theron, who introduced the world to an ultimate new badass in her character Imperator Furiosa, fans almost did get more of the film. The version she originally saw was significantly longer. In fact, she told audiences at a 2020 drive-in screening of the film that the first cut she saw was about four hours long. Miller has since clarified in his 2020 New York Comic-Con panel appearance that most of the trimming was done merely to shave off extensions of scenes we actually did see in the film, but there are still some key scenes that were almost very different or completely edited out. Here's a look at some of Mad Max: Fury Road scenes we never got to see.

There was another scene from that same section of the film that was also dropped by Sixel with Miller's blessing. In the theatrical version of the movie, after Furiosa and Max decide to march the War Rig back to the Citadel, the film jumps from their handshake agreement straight to the shot of Immortan Joe singing while his War Boys rest, until one spots the War Rig on the move in the background and the final chase scene commences. However, Miller originally had another quick scene he planned to unfold before War Rig officially returned.

Miller told Horowitz at NYCC this would have entailed Furiosa, Max, Immortan Joe's wives, Nux (Nicholas Hoult), and their allies from the Vuvalini bracing themselves for action onboard the War Rig. "We had a scene where the War Rig arrives up on top of a hill above the Wasteland, and we see that Max is there. He pops up through the roof [with] his binoculars and he sees what's out there [and] he signals to Furiosa," Miller said. "You see the Vuvalini hanging off the vehicle like shotgun riders. You see them ride along and pull up alongside the character played by Megan Gale — the Valkyrie — she's riding on the back of a motor bike, and they all look at each other, ready for battle." 

In the end, though, Miller agreed with Sixel's decision to axe the scene, saying that the end result of cutting this scene and the rally scene was "way better than it would have been."

Fans of Imperator Furiosa have a lot to look forward to when Miller takes us back in time to find out how she became such a fierce foe to Immortan Joe in the first place with the forthcoming Mad Max: Fury Road prequel. Though Fury Road gave us some clues about her past — chiefly, that she was stolen from her people in the Green Place when she was a child — we got to see a lot more about Max's past than hers throughout the film. And apparently, we almost saw even more of his dark, twisted history before Sixel got into the editing booth.

Speaking to Pro Video Coalition in 2016, Sixel explained that early test audiences for the movie wanted to know more about why Max had such a terrible disposition at the start of the film, which is what prompted her to add the opening sequence with his voiceover and those scattered glimpses of a little girl he failed to rescue before the events of Fury Road. Sixel said, however, that only a handful of the shots she tried out for the film actually made it in. 

"We experimented with flash or subliminal cuts to hint at past trauma. I tried many different ones. A few survived, including the lava shots when Max wakes up after the storm," Sixel explained. Her choice to cut in those blasts from the past was deliberate, as she also said it was her way of resisting pressures to incorporate a recap of the first three films in the series, which starred Mel Gibson in the title role.

There is very little love lost between Max and Imperator Furiosa when they decide to go their separate ways after she kills off Immortan Joe and takes over the Citadel. Though they have become allies, and he even saved her life with his roadside surgery skills, there's nothing romantic about their bond. However, there is one subplot that involves former enemies finding something like love on the broken road: Capable (Riley Keough) develops an unlikely bond with Nux, and, after discovering him hiding out on the War Rig, manages to recruit him as an essential ally for Furiosa and Max.

In the end, it is Nux's fondness for Capable that convinces him to sacrifice himself to close off the pass to Immortan Joe's minions. But in the original footage for the film, fans would have seen some more of Nux and Capable's impact on the film's grand finale. Sixel told Pro Video Coalition of the scene when Max and Furiosa decide to return to the Citadel, saying, "The first cuts of the scene gave more weight to Capable and Nux and not enough to Max. With some careful rewriting and editing I managed to shift the focus back to Max. This was done without reshoots, only audio rerecords." In other words, there is a version of this scene gathering dust in an editing bay closet which would've shown Nux and Capable being the real tragic heroes in the end.