Mad Max: Fury Road getting black & white edition because it’s the ‘best version’ of the film

Black and white tends to be the territory of indie films - usually talky ones like Manhattan or (more recently) Frances Ha - and is rarely applied to VFX-laden actions films.

Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller believes his movie looks best without the colour though, so is getting a black and white (styled as ‘black & chrome’, sounds cooler I guess) edition cut for a new Blu-ray.

He previously explained that the discovery came completely by accident on the cutting room floor.

“The best version of ‘Fury Road’ was what we called a ‘slash dupe’: a cheap, black-and-white version of the movie for the composer,” he told the LA Times.

“Something about it seemed more authentic and elemental. So I asked Eric Whipp, the [‘Fury Road’] colorist, ‘can I see some scenes in black and white with quite a bit of contrast?’ They looked great. So I said to the guys at Warners, ‘can we put a black-and-white version on the DVD?’ There wasn’t enough room. [It’ll end up] on another version with commentary and other features.”

Given the film’s relatively flat colour palette, covered in sand and dirt as it is, I can imagine this working quite nicely.

Mad Max High Octane Collection, which includes the original trilogy and a ton of other features, is out 6 December.

Last year, a film fan discerned the average colour of every frame of different films to show their distinctive colour palettes.