Modern Hollywood is rife with franchises. Unfortunately, most are inconsistent and disappointing. Thankfully, at least one franchise regularly knocks it out of the park when a new movie hits theaters. What helps is that every movie in the franchise has been directed by the same guy.
George Miller’s Mad Max saga rules, and that’s particularly true of Mad Max: Fury Road and its prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. If you’re looking for something to watch on Netflix this month, Furiosa is the perfect place to start. Here are three reasons it’s worth checking out:
Mad Max: Fury Road was, justifiably, a phenomenon upon its release and went on to become something of an Oscar juggernaut. Furiosa was not met with the same response, which is dumb because it might be even better than Fury Road.
Crucially, though, this prequel has a fundamentally different structure than Fury Road, telling Furiosa’s story in five parts as she’s taken away from her home, becomes a driver for Immortan Joe, and eventually gets her revenge against the man who killed her mother. The action set pieces are amazing when they come, but Furiosa is not defined by action in quite the same way Fury Road is, and that’s to its credit.
Charlize Theron’s work as Furiosa is so indelible that it felt impossible that anyone could live up to it. Anya Taylor-Joy manages to do just that, though, and she’s matched beat for beat by Chris Hemsworth, who is allowed to be far weirder here than most movies will let him be.
As Dementus, Hemsworth is a power-hungry demagogue who bumbles through various leadership positions despite realizing nothing is left in the world to fight for. The final confrontation between Furiosa and Dementus is one of the best scenes of 2024 precisely because it allows these two actors to finally square off.
Anyone who goes to the movies will see an abundance of options in blockbuster entertainment. However, so many of the most expensive movies made these days feel like they’re coming straight off a conveyor belt.
Furiosa doesn’t feel compromised in that way for a single second of its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, and even though it’s more reliant on CGI than Fury Road, it’s always searching for new visual ideas. There’s plenty of desert here, to be sure, but Furiosa knows how to take the settings we’re familiar with from Fury Road and use them to do something fundamentally different.
Stream Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga on Netflix
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?