The film Juice, which one could describe as a Mad Max–style thriller set around climate change where the goal is to track down the rich responsible for the mess, is in development.
It’s remarkably easy to slap a Mad Max label on nearly anything when you’re really tempted to do so. Take this example: Chris Hemsworth is prepping a movie about the “Finke Desert Race,” a two-day off-road race in which motorcycles, cars, buggies, and ATVs plow across the Australian desert, spanning roughly 200 kilometers. So Hemsworth is cooking up his own Mad Max with a hint of the Fast & Furious energy, which makes sense given that the Australian actor played the main villain in Furiosa, George Miller’s colossal flop in the wake of Fury Road.
It’s another way to cope with the mourning of the saga Mad Max, clearly ailing at the moment. George Miller may have written the script for The Wasteland, another Fury Road prequel that centers on Max this time, but Warner Bros. seems reluctant to touch it. The latest rumor on the subject is that the filmmaker is trying to sell one more Mad Max to another studio, just to bring his saga to a close.
While we wait to see what happens, anything that even remotely resembles a Mad Max is worth a look. And Juice fits that bill—a post-apocalyptic tale with a subtle eco-friendly subtext.
DO THE WRIGHT THING
According to Deadline, the post-apocalyptic novel Juice by Tim Winton, published in 2024, is headed to the big screen with a pretty solid team: director Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice, Hanna, The Hours) and screenwriter Abi Morgan (Shame, The Iron Lady), teaming up to tell this story set in a world ravaged by climate change:
« A young husband and father is recruited into a top-secret resistance organization, joining the ranks of a militia tasked with tracking down the guilty, wealthy and isolated, responsible for this global catastrophe. When a mission goes wrong, he goes on the run and must fight until the end to survive in this hostile world. »
In this futuristic world, Earth is in such a deplorable state that equatorial zones are uninhabitable, and humanity must hide underground for half of the time. People fight over refuges, resources, and energy (hence the book’s title, Juice), while a portion of the survivors is kept in servitude by the strongest, protected inside fortress-like compounds. Given that the story centers on a father and his daughter wandering the Australian desert, it’s hard not to think of Mad Max or even The Road, with an eco-friendly fury and a “eat the rich” twist that fans have come to expect.
Joe Wright, though associated with people who cry at elegant weddings in Pride & Prejudice, Return to Me, and Anna Karenina, has also proven himself in other genres. In 2011, he directed Saoirse Ronan as a super-soldier facing Cate Blanchett as the principal villain in Hanna, a stylish and sometimes virtuosic action film, buoyed by The Chemical Brothers’ score. In 2015, he also tried his hand at Pan, the Peter Pan reimagining where Hugh Jackman’s Blackbeard sang Nirvana. The film was a colossal flop.
Celebrated in 2017 with The Darkest Hours, the Winston Churchill biopic that earned Gary Oldman an Oscar, Wright has since racked up a string of flops. The Woman in the Window, with Amy Adams, was born of a difficult process: snagged up in Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox, it was ultimately sold to Netflix for release in 2021, in a version toned down according to the director. In 2021, his Cyrano with Peter Dinklage was a huge box-office miss, grossing less than $7 million on a $30 million budget.
Since then, Wright has kept himself busy on the small screen, including episodes of the series The Agency, the TV remake of the Bureau des Légendes with Michael Fassbender. Juice will thus mark his big return to the cinema.
It’s worth noting that author Tim Winton remains in high demand, since his novel The Riders is also being developed for Hollywood, with director Edward Berger (Conclave) and Brad Pitt in the lead. This thriller, in which a man searches for his missing wife, was shot in 2026.
