Mad Max - most profitable film

• The Sums: George Miller's dystopian road flick isn't one that immediately springs to mind when debating most profitable films, but it actually loitered around the Guinness Book for a good long while.
• Bringing in over $100m worldwide is - well, certainly WAS - a hugely impressive feat back in the day. Even more so when making it cost just $400k, Australian. That's probably about what James Cameron has earmarked for in-trailer slipper allowance on one of his shoots.
• Why So Profitable? With its defiantly niche steampunk overtones, Antipodean roots and only a pre-fame Mel Gibson silhouetted on the 3-colour poster, it's hard to argue that it wasn't simply down to the film being, y'know, awesome. This one's a relatively rare case of a B-movie going global on merit alone. Hurrah.
• Who Got Rich? George Miller raised the money for Mad Max by working as an Emergency Room Doctor. He raised the money for Mad Max 2 by asking Warner Brothers.
• Though the film had a limited run in the United States and earned only $8 million there, it did very well elsewhere around the world and went on to earn $100 million worldwide.Since it was independently financed with a reported budget of just $400,000 AUD.
• It was a major financial success. For thirty years, the movie held a record in Guinness Book of Records as the highest profit-to-cost ratio of a motion picture, conceding the record only in 2009 to Paranormal Activity. The film was awarded three Australian Film Institute Awards in 1979 (for editing, sound, and musical score).
• Both New Zealand and Sweden initially banned the film.
• George Miller was a medical doctor in Victoria, Australia, working in a hospital emergency room, where he saw many injuries and deaths of the types depicted in the movie. While in residency at a Melbourne hospital, he met amateur film maker Byron Kennedy at a summer film school in 1971. The duo produced the short film Violence in the Cinema, Part 1, which was screened at a number of film festivals and won several awards. Eight years later, the duo created Mad Max, with the assistance of first time screenwriter James McCausland (who appears in the film as the bearded man in an apron in front of the diner).
• Miller believed that audiences would find his violent story to be more believable if set in a bleak, dystopic future. The film was shot over a period of twelve weeks in Australia, between December 1978 and February 1979, in and around Melbourne. Many of the car-chase scenes for the original Mad Max were filmed near the town of Lara, just north of Geelong. The movie was shot with a widescreen anamorphic lens, the first Australian film to use one.