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Fury Road’ goes black and white and 4K in upcoming ‘Mad Max High Octane’ box set

By Rick Marshall September 15, 2016

Max jumps from a car in Mad Max: Fury Road. — Village Roadshow Pictures

George Miller’s post-apocalyptic adventure Mad Max: Fury Road was one of the big winners at the last Academy Awards ceremony, so it should come as no surprise that the film is getting super-charged for an upcoming collection of the entire Mad Max franchise — one that will include the stunning black-and-white version of Fury Road.

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is bringing together all four films in the franchise for its Mad Max High Octane Collection, which will include both a 4K-Ultra HD version of Fury Road and the “Black & Chrome” edition of the film, which presents Max’s cross-country odyssey in a fantastically detailed black-and-white palette. With the collection hitting shelves in early December, it’s positioned to be a pretty great gift for anyone who wants to ride eternal, shiny and chrome, to Valhalla.

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Both the DVD and Blu-ray editions of the box set will include 1979’s franchise-spawning Mad Max, the 1981 sequel Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (the one with “Lord Humungus,” the giant marauder in leather bondage gear), 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (the one with Tina Turner and “Master Blaster”), and last year’s Fury Road, which had actor Tom Hardy replace Mel Gibson as franchise hero Max Rockatansky.

While seeing Fury Road in 4K-Ultra HD has a lot of appeal — although you’ll need a 4K television to appreciate it — it’s the black-and-white version of the film that will likely be a big draw for many movie fans. It’s reportedly a pretty amazing experience to see the film’s wild car chase across the desert wasteland in black and white, and Miller has always had a fantastic handle on crafting epic visuals in any light.

The Blu-ray edition of the set will carry a $80 price tag, while the DVD version is expected to retail for around $55. Both collections include more than five hours of special features (including a feature-length documentary on the making of the 1979 movie), which should actually be pretty fascinating, given how much went into making Fury Road the award-winning action masterpiece that it is.

There will also be a stand-alone “Black & Chrome” (aka black-and-white) release of Mad Max: Fury Road available on Blu-ray for around $30, with the set containing the original theatrical version of the film and the black-and-white edition.

You’ll be able to witness all of the aforementioned sets with your favorite War Boys when they hit shelves December 6.

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Every year, five films are nominated for an Academy Award in the “Visual Effects” category. This year, each and every nominee offers its own unique inside look at the amazing tricks filmmakers and their effects teams must use to pull off the visual spectacles that make for a big-screen blockbuster. In recognition of these five films -- and one of our favorite Oscar categories -- we’re putting the spotlight on one “Visual Effects” nominee each day leading up to Sunday’s broadcast, and taking a closer look at what made them stand out.
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One of the most talked-about films of last year and a nominee for this year's "Best Picture" Academy Award, Mad Max: Fury Road is like no other film in this year's Oscar race -- and not just because of its post-apocalyptic setting or the fact that it's a sequel (two qualities that are exceedingly rare in Oscar nominees). Fury Road also happens to contain some of the year's most spectacular action sequences, which are brought to the screen with a mix of practical stunt work and digital effects that merge all of the explosive shots captured on camera into the masterpiece that is director George Miller's wild ride through the wasteland.
While much is made of the film's practical effects -- which feature fleets of vehicles careening and occasionally exploding across the desert while actors fly through the air between them on poles, platforms, and elastic ropes -- Miller and visual-effects supervisor Andrew Jackson made extensive use of digital techniques to blend the footage of stunt crews' performances and build some of the film's most stunning sequences. In the end, more than 2000 VFX shots went into Fury Road, with Jackson overseeing work from primary VFX studio Iloura, as well as in-house studio Kennedy Miller Mitchell (dubbed "Fury FX" during production) and other teams.

"I’ve been joking about how the film has been promoted as being a live action stunt driven film - which it is," Jackson told FX Guide back in May 2015. "But also how there’s so little CGI in the film. The reality is that there’s 2000 VFX shots in the film. A very large number of those shots are very simple clean-ups and fixes and wire removals and painting out tire tracks from previous shots, but there are a big number of big VFX shots as well."