Warner Bros. Pictures took the stage at the Anaheim Convention Center for their WonderCon panel, offering a brief look at two of their summer blockbusters: George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road and Brad Peyton’s San Andreas.
“It’s about a family in trouble,” said star Carla Gugino about the latter, “It’s not dinosaurs. It’s not aliens. It’s not monsters.”
Stressing the realism of the May 29 release, Gugino joined Peyton and co-star Alexandra Daddario on stage to preview an extended trailer for the disaster actioner. While the version shown was said to be a WonderCon exclusive, you can check out the recently-released second trailer right here.
Mad Max: Fury Road, meanwhile, elicited quite a few cheers with both an extended trailer and a full scene from the May 15 release. The scene, which was also screened at SXSW, begins with Tom Hardy’s Max Rockatansky waking up in the middle of the desert after some kind of crash. It appears that he’s a prisoner, his face covered by a spiked mask that runs via a chain to the wreckage of a car in the sand. Max follows the chain, finding the opposite end connected to a lifeless body (Nicholas Hoult’s Nux). Max throws the young man’s body onto the sand, furiously tugging at the chain in the hopes of ripping Nux’s hand right off. It doesn’t work, though and Max instead finds a shotgun, leveling the barrel against Nux’s wrist. When Max pulls the trigger, however, the cartridge turns out to be a dud. Willing to try anything, Max begins to scrap the limp appendage against the front of his spiked mask, to little avail.
The scene cuts to Max walking through the desert with Nux’s body draped over Max’s shoulder. Approaching a massive tanker in the sand, Max pulls out the empty shotgun. Turning the corner on the tanker, though, he finds quite a sight. There, a group of beautiful women, clad in white robes, stand against the horizon, cleaning themselves with a hose that leads to the tanker. One of the women is pregnant (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s Splendid) while another holds a pair of bolt cutters and is using it to remove a dangerous-looking chastity belt from one of the others. Charlize Theron’s Furiosa is there, too, the top half of her shaved head covered in black ash.
Max approaches the women, his eyes clearly desperate for the water, aiming his gun. He demands the hose, spraying himself in the face right through his mask. Some water falls on Nux and he stirs slightly, revealing that he’s not entirely dead.
Max wants the woman with the bolt cutters to come cut the chain on his mask, but as she’s about to, Furiosa charges him, knocking him to the ground. She’s an incredible fighter, instantly disarming Max and putting Max’s own gun to Max’s temple. She pulls the trigger, but as she realizes she’s been tricked by his bluff, Max has caught his breath and hurls her against the side of the tanker. Nux, then, is waking up and immediately becomes a player in a fight scene that alternates upper hands between Max and Furiosa as the maidens tug on Max’s chain as though they’re pulling back a feral dog.
At one point, Furiosa makes it to the side of the tanker and hits a piece of clay molding on the outside. It shatters to reveal an emergency handgun. As she takes it and aims it, though, the clip falls out and her shot misses Max, the bullet ricocheting against the tanker.
Tripping Furiosa with the chain, Max wrestles her to ground as Nux hands him the clip. Forcing the front of her body to the ground, Max is on top of Furiosa and, in a flash, has loaded the clip into the gun pulled the trigger repeatedly, not hitting Furiosa, but blasting several times in an arc all along either side of her head.
