Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Ending Explained

Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga ends where Mad Max: Fury Road begins. Directed by George Miller from a screenplay he wrote with Nico Lathouris, Furiosa features new and familiar characters, and follows the title character’s beginnings. From her childhood through her adulthood, and how it was shaped by the Wasteland and the cruelty of those who reside there. While walking through the titular character’s timeline, Furiosa splits its runtime into five different chapters, with each presenting the most defining moments of her journey.

While the first chapter, titled “The Pole of Inaccessibility,” highlights how young Furiosa ended up leaving the Green Place and losing her mother, the second, “Lessons from the Wasteland,” focuses on how Dementus’ brutality gradually callouses her and changes her worldview. The third one, “The Stowaway,” shows how she started as a stowaway, which slowly paved the way for her to become a road warrior. This is followed by the fourth chapter, “Homeward,” which highlights Furiosa’s growing hunger for returning home and sets the stage for the final arc, “Beyond Vengeance,” where she finally finds the revenge she seeks.

Furiosa’s Ending Directly Leads Into Mad Max: Fury Road

The film’s final moments are scenes pulled from Fury Road

Rather than give it a separate ending, George Miller ties Furiosa’s ending to Mad Max: Fury Road, with Furiosa shown leading Immortan Joe’s wives to her War Rig, where they hide while Furiosa executes her escape attempt. It’s rare for a prequel to connect so fluidly with its predecessor, but Furiosa not only leads into Mad Max: Fury Road directly, it turns the latter into an epilogue during the credits sequence. Furiosa’s ending essentially serves as a reminder of what happened during the events of Fury Road. By linking one ending to the other’s beginning, Furiosa becomes one seamless story.

A closer look at Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga‘s ending also reveals that Charlize Theron plays the titular character in the film’s final moments. Although Theron did not officially return to portray the character in the prequel film, the final scene where she shows up was actually shot for Mad Max: Fury Road. Since it was deleted from the final cut of the 2015 film, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga‘s creators decided to repurpose the footage (confirmed via X) to perfectly sync the prequel with its parent movie.

Why Furiosa Turns Dementus Into A Peach Tree

Furiosa only reveals the truth to the History Man

While Furiosa is believed to have killed Dementus — different stories have different deaths, including a bullet to the head — she smuggled him back to the Citadel and planted her mother’s peach seed in his flesh. Over the years, the tree grew, with Dementus attached to it, forever stuck with no means of escape. Furiosa likely thought this was a better option for Dementus’ fate because he’d brought nothing but death and destruction his whole life, killing Furiosa’s mother, Praetorian Jack, and so many others.

The fact he’s forever linked to a peach tree allows Dementus to do what he never could — give and nurture life. It’s a form of torture for a man who hated so much during his life. At the same time, Furiosa and Dementus were a lot alike. They were both driven by what they’d lost in life. Furiosa knew that, but by sparing Dementus’ life and planting her mother’s seed in his flesh, she was still protecting the Green Place. She was ensuring Dementus wouldn’t be able to find it while showcasing that beauty can grow from something horrible.

Furiosa’s decision to spare his life goes beyond revenge; she could have easily killed Dementus. In her own way, however, she was proving that she could provide life with the tree, bringing a piece of nature and abundance to a place that didn’t have any. The Dementus tree was also a reminder that things, no matter how bad they are, could start anew in the most unexpected of places. It was a promise Furiosa made to never stop fighting to return to her home despite the horror she’d seen and experienced. Furiosa wouldn’t let herself become as jaded as Dementus.

Furiosa Is About Hate, Fury Road Is About Hope

Furiosa spends much of the movie on the hunt for Dementus

Furiosa and Fury Road contrast each other in terms of themes. Where Fury Road was about hope — for a different, better life, of escaping horrific circumstances, etc. — Furiosa was about hate. Throughout the film, Furiosa couldn’t allow herself to dream; when she had a brief glimmer of hope that she could finally leave (with Jack in tow), it was ripped away from her. For most of the film, Furiosa wanted nothing more than to avenge her mother, and the desire to exact revenge on Dementus only fueled her hatred for him.

She spent her life passionately hating Dementus, hating her circumstances and the Wasteland, Immortan Joe’s treatment of her and his wives, and likely hating what she had to do to survive. By the events of Fury Road, though, Furiosa had made connections and amassed enough power to pull off a proper plan of escape. She was determined to succeed, and there was actual hope that she would. There were certainly obstacles in her way, but Furiosa felt a bit less despondent in Fury Road. If she didn’t have any hope that things could be different, she wouldn’t have bothered trying.

How Furiosa Lost Her Arm

Losing Her Arm Was An Act Of Sacrifice To Achieve Freedom

Throughout its runtime, Mad Max: Fury Road maintains an air of mystery surrounding how Furiosa lost her arm. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga finally provides answers by walking through the events that led to her sacrificing her arm. The story arc begins at the Bullet Farm, where Jack and Furiosa fight against Dementus and his men before fleeing the scene in a car. Unfortunately, despite their best efforts to escape, Dementus catches up with them. When Furiosa attempts to resist Dementus’ capture, her elbow is dislocated after her arm gets caught between her car’s window and Dementus’ monster truck’s wheel.

Her elbow’s dislocation gets even worse when Dementus flips their vehicle before capturing them. While Jack gets chained to a man’s bike, Furiosa is left hanging on a hook by her left arm. Despite being in a disadvantaged position, Furiosa plans her escape by ripping off her injured left arm from the hook, while Dementus and his men remain distracted by their pursuit of hurting and killing Jack. When Dementus finally gets bored and returns to focusing on Furiosa, he only finds her left forearm hanging down the hook. This scene perfectly captures the hefty price Furiosa pays for her freedom.

Related

How Many Lines Furiosa Has In Each Mad Max Movie

The Mad Max franchise has always prioritized visuals over dialogue, and that fact is evident in how many lines Furiosa has had in her movies.

How Furiosa’s Ending Sets Up Another Mad Max Prequel

Furiosa’s post-credits teases the expansive world of Mad Max

The ending ties directly to Mad Max: Fury Road, but Furiosa’s post-credits scene, a quick glimpse of Nux’s bird bobblehead wobbling in a car, hints at more to come. The item is part of a vehicle, and though it doesn’t actually feature any of the characters or anything truly significant to the story, it does indicate the Mad Max franchise isn’t over just because Furiosa’s story might be. There are plenty of other characters from Fury Road who could benefit from a prequel, including Nicholas Hoult’s Nux.

Crucially, the film’s ending teases the expansion of the Mad Max movies. If Furiosa can get her own movie, as Miller fleshes out her backstory and what led her to escape Immortan Joe with his wives, it would be interesting to see what else the director can come up with. And while another Mad Max prequel likely depends on how well Furiosa does at the box office, there’s room for more. Since Max and his famous car were glimpsed in the film, it’s possible the next installment will focus on his origin story.

What George Miller Has Said About More Mad Max Movies

While the film is not entirely confirmed, plans for a film titled Mad Max: The Wasteland have been in the works for years. Miller has openly discussed other films in the franchise, though when they’ll be set within the Mad Max movie timeline is unclear. Miller has written backstories for several characters, which is how Furiosa came to be. In terms of Mad Max: The Wasteland, here’s what Miller had to say about it (via Digital Spy):

“I can never predict any one of these. If Furiosa does well enough and we’ve got the appetite for it, we’ll move forward. But at this point, it’s way too early.”

Interestingly, Miller wrote a novella about Mad Max ahead of Fury Road. Speaking with Deadline, the director explained that it was just for the actors and crew at the time. Here’s what Miller said about Max Max’s story:

…we wrote the story of Furiosa in the 15 or 16 years of her life before we meet her in Fury Road, we wrote a story about Max in the year before he got there and so on. They ended up being a screenplay and one was a novella.

It seems like the Mad Max novella could be something that gets an expansion, considering Furiosa’s backstory gets a whole film to itself. In addition to a potential prequel involving Mad Max’s story before Fury Road, Miller also has ideas about Furiosa’s time at the Citadel, in the years after the 40-day war and her escape. Miller (via Digital Spy) hasn’t “got those stories mapped out at all yet,” but that there’s “a lot to tell yet with the Mad Max story.” Even if it’ll take several more years to get made, Furiosa likely isn’t the end of the franchise.

What George Miller Has Said About Furiosa’s Ending & Dementus’ Fate

George Miller Gave The Actors A Lot Of Freedom Improvise

In an interview (via RadioTimes), George Miller revealed that he chose to end the movie that way because, for starters, it is where the story took him. The closing scene was also a “minimalistic” and “elegant” exercise, in which he decided to shoot it after almost the entire filming for the movie was done. He also recalled that he was so immersed and lost in what Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor-Joy were doing with the climactic scene that even he forgot his responsibilities as a director. Miller’s insights suggest that Furiosa‘s ending was the sweet spot between planned storytelling and spontaneous creativity.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

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A prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa is an action-adventure film that tells the origin story of the headstrong and fearless Furiosa. Set shortly after the beginning of the “end of the world,” Furiosa is kidnapped and brought before a powerful warlord, now forced to work for him. To find her way back home, Furiosa will adapt to the new harsh and arid world as she grows into the Furiosa she becomes known to be. 

Director

George Miller

Release Date

May 24, 2024

Studio(s)

Warner Bros. Pictures

Distributor(s)

Warner Bros. Pictures

Writers

George Miller , Nick Lathouris

Runtime

148 Minutes

Budget

168 million

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