Warner Bros. PicturesAfter decades of muddled worldbuilding, Mad Max: Fury Road successfully hit the reset button on George Miller’s blistering apocalyptic franchise. When the film arrived in 2015, fans hoped it would be enough to propel the franchise into the future... but Miller has only been interested in the past. Last year, the director returned with the saga’s latest installment, Furiosa. A prequel to Fury Road, it traced the origins of Charlize Theron’s title heroine — now played by Anya Taylor-Joy — across 15 years. Miller planned to take a similar route with Mad Max himself: “We wrote a story about Max in the year before he got [to Fury Road],” the director revealed in 2024. “The writers know what happened to Mad Max in that year before, and we have a whole story of that, which I would like to do sometime if I get the chance.”Said story has been tentatively titled The Wasteland, but audiences’ lackluster response to Furiosa might have derailed plans for another big-screen story. Since the 2024 film underperformed at the box office, insiders assumed that Warner Bros. — which has backed every Mad Max film from the franchise’s inception — would be wary about investing in another would-be blockbuster. Though there haven’t been many updates on Wasteland since Miller expressed interest in making it, he and Warner Bros. might be switching gears behind the scenes.The next Mad Max prequel, Wasteland, is reportedly being reworked into an HBO Max series. | Warner Bros. PicturesAccording to Mad Max Bible, a podcast dedicated to the franchise, Wasteland is very much alive, but on the small screen. Screenwriter Shaun Grant is reportedly reworking Miller’s treatment into an episodic series, one that would likely stream on HBO Max. According to Bible, Miller won’t be directing if the show gets off the ground, but given the director’s perfectionism, we can expect his guiding hand to be on Wasteland in some shape or form.If Warner balked at the pricetag for yet another Mad Max film, a show certainly seems like a safer bet. The studio has already pulled a similar strategy with its Dune franchise: while director Denis Villeneuve continues to adapt Frank Herbert’s mainline novels, Dune: Prophecy tackles Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s prequel trilogy. Its first season didn’t exactly make waves, but it’ll get another chance with its second season. The stakes are lower on streaming, making it an ideal platform for the next chapter of the Mad Max saga.Of course, this is far from an official update, but it’s certainly a tantalizing rumor. Miller’s time with this saga will be ending soon, but there are still plenty of stories within this world that deserve to be told. If done right, Wasteland could chart a new path that honors Miller’s work and keeps the franchise alive.