Yeah this is most likely the wrong movie to blame.
Fury Road was IMHO the blockbuster movie of the 2010s.
I didn't have time yet but very much looking forward to see what George Miller has cooked up this time around!
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Fury Road is my idea of a blockbuster. But it was the 21st highest grossing movie of 2015! Financially, it was a mild success. Terminator Genisys made more money.
It gets blame because the massive budget
Hollywood can’t make great smaller movies like that anymore without spending $100M which raises the stakes and it also comes with a ton of studio baggage afraid of any sort of risk
Fury Road was certainly not a cash grab, but a prequel to the blockbuster of the 10s except with a female lead definitely smells like a cash grab.
She was the protagonist of the other one too. The Jay Gatsby to Max’s Nick Carraway.
And AFAIK this is built almost entirely off the extensive character background notes developed while writing her for Fury Road, so it’s not like they just cooked up this story because they needed something.
It was supposed to come out as an animated companion backstory like the Animatrix. The budget would have been lower for that. Instead we get it 10 years later and much bigger than it was meant to be. No idea whose choice that is (Miller, the studio, someone in between). If I didn't have a kid I'd have seen it opening weekend; Fury Road was a perfect flick.
I was worried, given these kind of story-behind-the-story prequels are usually a bad idea, but was pleasantly surprised. It delivers Fury Road style action of a similar (so, exceptionally high) quality both in raw action-excitement and in use of the scenes to convey story and (especially) characterization and character arcs, while being very differently-structured and not at all feeling like just the same thing again, or like it’s just trying to fill in every single gap in the setting left by Fury Road.
It also feels thick with influence and fluency in cinema per se, in a way that Fury Road didn’t to me, and I think it may mean this one rewards repeat watches to an exceptional degree.
George Miller wanted to make this story at the same time as Fury Road, right after so it wasn’t a cash grab at time of conception
What a female lead has to do with it?
I like how the anti-woke internet twisted the subject for their agenda, claiming people didn't watch because they have apprehensions about woke Hollywood and female protagonists.
Also they often don't seem to have a clue what kind of living legend George Miller is.