Mad Max Movies in Order — A UK Streaming Guide to the Wasteland
If you're looking for a UK streaming guide to the Mad Max franchise, we've got you covered. George Miller’s iconic series has been dazzling audiences with breathless chase scenes and inventive vehicles for the best part of 50 years now, with five feature films ready and waiting for fans of Miller's signature dystopian wasteland to enjoy — and if reports are to be believed, that number could rise to six in the not so distant future.
In the list below, which is arranged by order of release date, you’ll find details on every film in the Mad Max franchise so far (and one that’s apparently on the way). If you’d rather watch the saga chronologically, simply move Furiosa to before Fury Road and leave Beyond Thunderdome to the very end. Read on to learn a bit more info on each film and or use the guide below to find out where to stream each one on services like AppleTV Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
This article has been updated by Rory O'Connor.
When Miller made his directorial debut with Mad Max in 1979, he had no idea it would go on to spawn one of the greatest series of action films ever made. He also likely didn't expect it to rake in upwards of $100 USD at the worldwide box office — thus laying the groundwork for the singular franchise in the years that followed.
For the lead, George Miller plucked the then relatively unknown Mel Gibson pretty much out of obscurity and put him in the role of Max Rockatansky, a police officer who (d)evolves into a rogue vigilante after his wife is killed by a motorcycle gang. Made on a low budget, this first movie in the franchise hasn't got the inventive production design that the series would later be known for, but it remains a lean, mean, and brilliantly directed revenge flick that — while undeniably provocative — has aged incredibly well.
In 1981, Miller returned with Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, a film that delved even deeper into the dystopian Australia hinted at in the original. The story picks up three years later, by which point society has completely collapsed into tribal warfare, with the remaining population now reduced to fighting for decimated resources in a desert wasteland.
The film, in which Max ends up helping out a group of oil refinery workers as they attempt to escape the station through a horde of murderous bikers, was the first in the series to feature the souped-up vehicles that the Mad Max franchise is known for — so if you're a fan of the War Rig from the more recent movies, you have to go back and check this one out.
By the law of averages, every great long-running franchise has to have at least one film that’s less loved than the others. For Mad Max, that movie is the third instalment, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome — which, looking back, was a bit of a "jump the shark" moment for the franchise. This is mostly down to Tina Turner's incredible performance as Aunty Entity — but hey, if you enjoy a little '80s camp you'll probably have a perfectly good time with it.
Released in 1985, Beyond Thunderdome takes up the story some eighteen years after the events of Road Warrior, with Max in exile. Soon, he finds himself protecting a group of children who survived a crash in the desert.
In 2015, after literal decades of development and false starts, Miller returned to the series with the critically acclaimed Mad Max: Fury Road — a production so infamous that it famously inspired Steven Soderbergh to exclaim, “I don't understand how they're not still shooting that and I don't understand how hundreds of people aren't dead.” For Max’s grand return, Tom Hardy was brought in to play the title role the film ultimately belongs to Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa — a cinematic heroine for the ages.
The story, which is basically a continuous action movie that Miller portions out into 4 incredible chase sequences, sees Max forge and unlikely bond with Furiosa, a renegade general trying to help five women escape the clutches of the villainous Immortan Joe.
While writing the screenplay for Fury Road, Miller and screenwriters Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris fleshed out the side characters to such an extent that they wound up with enough material for two more films. The first of those to be released was 2024’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, in prequel in which Anya Taylor-Joy plays a young Furiosa and explores the character’s origin story as she comes of age in the green place.
After the success of Fury Road, Miller was naturally given a war chest of new toys to work with — meaning that the chase sequences are once again utterly phenomenal and even feature a few vehicles that can glide. If you come to this franchise for that kind of exhilaration, you will not be disappointed.
While details about the the next film in the franchise, currently titled Mad Max: The Wasteland, are as scarce as water in the desert at the moment, it is likely we will see the return of Tom Hardy as Max in a continuation of the story in Fury Road. More on this one as we get it!
