Movies
Your Favorite Character Will Be Back in ‘Mad Max: The Wasteland’
I’m talking about the Doof Warrior, of course.
When Mad Max: Fury Road was released back in 2015, the internet was almost literally ablaze with excitement. George Miller’s return to the long-dead franchise was worth the wait, to say the least, and it was such a spectacle of wildly over the top action and world-building that many immediately crowned it one of the best action films ever made.
I was one of those people. And I stick by that opinion.
Not surprisingly, the Academy Award-winning Fury Road is soon getting a follow-up tentatively titled Mad Max: The Wasteland, which will be the first of two sequels being planned by George Miller. Speaking with The Independent this week, Miller teased the future of the rebooted franchise, revealing that the ass-kicking guitarist known as the Doof Warrior will be back!
He told the site:
We dug down deep into the subtext, the backstory of all the characters, and indeed the world…and without really thinking about it, we wrote two other screenplays just as part of the bible of the stories. Somewhere, if the planets align, there will be two other films.
If we get to make another movie, the Doof Warrior will be there! I know who his mother was. I know how it was that a man who is mute and blind survived the apocalypse. I know his story very well!
Miller added that he’s first making a smaller film before returning to the Mad Max world.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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