So despite Mel Gibson saying no to Mad Max 4 it seems to be going ahead anyway, even after a failed attempt.

The director of the Mad Max series, George Miller, said:

"Mad Max 4 is so prepared, there seems to be a lot of momentum for it to get done...Right now, I've got another, smaller film to do, and then we'll gear up and do Mad Max again. In what form and so on, I don't know. But it hasn't gotten stale in the meantime, and I'm very, very keen to do it. It seems like there's the appetite out there."

In the comments over at InFocus magazine through SciFi Wire he tells how close it was to being made:

...we were in Namibia, Africa, and we were about to start shooting — and that’s when the war started. And at that point, the American dollar, against the currencies we were working with — the Australian dollar and the South African rand — crashed 20 percent, and we lost a lot of our budget. And besides, we couldn’t get insurance, and we couldn’t get our vehicles transported on the container ships.

At the end of the interview he quite clearly states that originally it wasn't going be a prequel, it was a sequel, and Gibson was signed up for it at the time. It's a shame we'll loose Gibson from the role, it would have been wonderful to revisit that charcter so late on, however it looks not to be. How about a Mad Max 4 though? Is there still desire today, even without Gibson?