Collider released its 100 Greatest Movies of the 21st Century list in December 2025 and placed Mad Max: Fury Road at No. 1.
George Miller, who wrote and directed the film, has long argued its force comes from how it was made — a point he spelled out years before the ranking appeared.
The choice is not a gentle nostalgia pick. Collider said Mad Max: Fury Road took the title because it is action-packed, has incredible imagery, and has an important story, putting a 2015 release at the top of a list that spans the first quarter-century of the 21st Century.
That praise tracks with what Miller told an interviewer in 2015 about how the movie was shot. He said, "This is a movie that's real vehicles and real people and real desert. It had to be old school. There no flying humans. It's not a green screen movie. So, we had to shoot it for real. And I think that makes the movie feel very, very authentic and, all the action and so on. Everything you see on the screen happened," — an argument that frames Fury Road's spectacle as craftsmanship rather than digital artifice.
Context helps explain why the pick landed where it did. The Collider list grouped Mad Max: Fury Road with other widely admired films in its top 10, naming In the Mood for Love, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Social Network, The Dark Knight, Inglourious Basterds, No Country for Old Men, Mulholland Drive, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and Parasite among the decade-defining works. Fury Road is the fourth Mad Max film, released in 2015, the last major feature in a franchise that began when Mel Gibson originated Max Rockatansky in 1979 and continued in 1981 and 1985.
The ranking also reopens a creative choice Miller made in recasting his lead. He chose Tom Hardy to replace Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky, a decision Miller described at the time in terms that reached back to the original films. "For characters who don't say much, you need to be see a lot of stuff going on inside. And he was the first one who walked through the door that reminded me of Mel, 30 years before," Miller said, pointing to an acting lineage as much as a physical resemblance.
The tension running through the news is simple: Collider crowned a film a decade after its release that was deliberately made to look, feel and move like an analogue, physical thing in an era dominated by digital effects. Miller's insistence that "It's not a green screen movie" and that "everything you see on the screen happened" clashes with what many viewers now expect from tentpole action — seamless CGI, digital doubles and environments created in the computer. Fury Road's top placement asserts that audiences and critics still prize the immediacy of stuntwork and real-world risk.
What happens next is practical rather than prophetic. Collider's list will shape conversation about the century's cinema and reframe how festivals, retrospectives and film programs present the 2010s. But the more consequential fact is already clear: a film Miller made in 2015 by old-school means has held up enough in critics' eyes to outplace younger, flashier entries and to remind the industry that material craft and clarity of story can eclipse spectacle assembled on a screen.
That is why the headline matters today. Collider's decision confirms, in measurable terms, that Mad Max: Fury Road's blend of relentless action, striking imagery and an insistence on practical filmmaking gives it a lasting claim on the century's highest honors — a claim Miller himself has argued from the start.
