A New Mad Max Trilogy?

It's taken a long time to get off the ground, but it looks like Mad Max 4 -- a.k.a. Fury Road -- will finally start shooting in April. And now director and chief warrior of the wasteland George Miller is saying that the film is likely just the first part in a new trilogy.

The Australian Financial Review is running a profile on Miller and his latest project, Happy Feet Too. But Mad Max 4: Fury Road also comes up in the piece, where the director says that his team has written a trilogy of films.

"We started with [Fury Road], but we then started to do a second story and a third," he says. "We've written the script for the second and almost finished the third. We never intended to, they were part of the exploration of the characters."

Last we heard, Tom Hardy was set to play Max (replacing Mel Gibson), with Charlize Theron also starring. But the film has been hit with delay after delay, most recently abandoning a September 2010 production start in Australia's Broken Hill after an unfortunate rainy season turned Max's desert wasteland into a flower garden. Now the Warner Bros. film is set to start shooting in April in the Namibian desert.

Expect the full-on Hollywood tent-pole treatment on the picture as well.

"If [the budget is] above $100 million it's a big budget," says producer Doug Mitchell. "This is a bigger budget. People have speculated around $200 million [which] I'd neither deny nor confirm. It's a massive film."

But is it as massive as Master Blaster? Stay tuned...

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