Warner Bros. has moved the release date for George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road prequel Furiosa back a year to 2024.

Miller's latest trip to the post-apocalyptic Mad Max universe will now open in theaters on May 27 (i.e., Memorial Day), 2024, rather than June 23, 2023, as previously announced, reported Variety. The studio also scheduled its movie adaptation of Stephen King's 1975 horror novel Salem's Lot for a theatrical release starting Sept. 9, 2022. King's book centers on a novelist who returns to the town where he grew up as a child, only to discover it's being overtaken by vampires.

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Furiosa reveals the backstory for the titular warrior, who Charlize Theron famously brought to life in 2015's Fury Road. While the film was only a moderate box office, it earned rave reviews from critics on its way to collecting multiple Oscars, as well as a nod for Best Picture. Miller originally planned to have Theron portray the younger Furiosa by using digital de-aging but later decided the technology wasn't where he wanted it. He has since hired The Witch and The Queen's Gambit star Anya Taylor-Joy to bring the role to life instead.

In a recent interview, Miller revealed he auditioned Taylor-Joy after seeing her in an early cut of Edgar Wright's horror/thriller Last Night in Soho. “I’d known about Anya but I’d never seen her in a film until I saw her in Soho,” said Miller. “And I remember thinking, ‘Gee, she’s interesting.’ I started to say to [Wright], ‘I’m looking for someone to cast as Furiosa,’ and I barely got the sentence out before [he] said, ‘Don’t go any further, she’s great, she’s gonna be huge. She’s fantastic to work with.’ [He was] so emphatic about it.”

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Despite the release date delay, Furiosa remains slated to begin production in Australia's New South Wales in 2022. Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced it would be “the largest film ever to be filmed” in NSW earlier this year, with reports estimating it will inject $350 million into the state’s economy, as well as creating 850 jobs.

Furiosa's cast includes Chris Hemsworth and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in as-yet-unknown roles. The latter is fresh off starring in Nia DaCosta's Candyman and plays a young Morpheus in December's The Matrix Resurrections. He's also reprising his DC Extended Universe villain Black Manta for next year's Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.

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Source: Variety