This December, Dune: Part Three will drop into theaters opposite Avengers: Doomsday, a match-up that should be great fun to watch. It’s the final film in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movie trilogy, and is poised to be an ever bigger deal than the first two.
It also stands a good chance of ending the trilogy on a bum note.
Denis Villeneuve’s movies finally do Dune right
It was a long time coming
Although it wasn’t an instant hit upon release in 1965, it only took a few years for Frank Herbert’s Dune to become a bestselling book. Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides, the scion of a noble house in a far-flung future where “thinking machines” are forbidden but a drug called the spice has allowed human beings to perform feats previously unthinkable. Paul moves with his family to the desert planet of Arrakis, where the spice is produced. He is cast into exile, finds harbor with the native people of the planet, and ends the book as the emperor of the known universe.
Although Dune has plenty of heady ideas about ecology and prescience and politics baked into it, it has the shape of an adventure story, with Paul growing from a young man into a fearsome military leader. Despite its fame, Hollywood was slow to adapt Dune to the big screen; a 1984 effort from director David Lynch is best forgotten, while a TV movie version released in 2000 is better but held back by a tiny budget. In 2021, Denis Villeneuve and his team finally managed to crack the code. Dune: Part One and its sequel, 2024’s Dune: Part Two, adapt Herbert’s text with all the grandeur it deserves. The two movies form a brainy epic decades in the making.
Dune: Part Three will finally move beyond the original book and adapt its 1969 sequel, Dune Messiah. And that is where the danger lies.
Dune Messiah is a very different sort of book
Beware SPOILERS below
There’s a lot of rising action in Dune. Dune Messiah takes place after a lot of the biggest action has passed, after the Fremen people of Arrakis have carried out an interstellar jihad in Paul’s name, killing tens of billions of people across the universe. Paul (Timothée Chalamet) is firmly established as emperor. He’s married to Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) for political purposes, but his true love remains the Fremen woman Chani (Zendaya).
I won’t spoil all the particulars, but Dune Messiah is much slower and more internal than Dune. Much of it takes place in Paul’s court as he deals with problems close to home. Irulan is his wife, but not his friend. His former swordmaster Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) is resurrected as a ghola, an artificially created human grown by the Bene Tleilax, who have mastery over these matters. Robert Pattinson will play a Tleilaxu character named Scytale, adding another famous face to the movie’s already-impressive lineup of stars.
Interesting things happen in Dune Messiah, but there is little in the way of the epic action and adventure that helped the first book (and the first two movies) resonate with so many people. In fact, the book is designed to push against those aspects. It was always Herbert’s intention to use the Dune books to critique the idea of charismatic leaders, but people — both those in the story and those reading it — latched onto Paul as a heroic figure anyway. In Dune Messiah, Herbert returns to that idea, and takes Paul somewhere it’s harder to get excited about.
Denis Villeneuve must not fear
Fear is the mind-killer
Overall, Dune Messiah is a much more challenging text than Dune, and Denis Villeneuve has a couple of options when it comes to adapting it. One is to keep it more or less as is, and trust that audiences will adapt to the change of pace. After all, the first two movies had plenty of atmosphere. Who’s to say that viewers won’t go along with the philosophizing in Dune Messiah, with the intentional subversion of traditionally heroic tropes? It’s a cliche that audiences only want action and adventure and will be disappointed in that. But we can have more faith in them, right?
The other option is to change the story in a way that makes it more palatable to that cliche audience, and it does look like Villeneuve is doing that at least to some degree. Timothée Chalamet has said that Dune: Part Three takes more “creative liberty” with the source material, and just watching the trailers, it’s easy to see some big differences. In particularly, there look to be a lot more action scenes than there are in the book, which supports the idea that Villeneuve is spicing things up to appeal to people who want action and excitement.
And that could be dangerous, because it risks turning the movie into something that won’t please anybody. It could be too different from the text to please fans of the book, but still too cerebral and strange to please people who want an epic adventure film.
Trust in Villeneuve
This is the worst case scenario. Denis Villeneuve is a talented director with a lot of great movies under his belt, including Blade Runner 2049, Arrival, and Sicario. Unless and until Dune: Part Three comes out and actually disappoints people, he deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Dune: Part Three will be in theaters on December 18, 2026. And if it actually does let people down, there are always other sci-fi epics out there to enjoy.
- Release Date
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December 18, 2026
- Director
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Denis Villeneuve
- Writers
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Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, Frank Herbert
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Timothée Chalamet
Paul Atreides
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Florence Pugh
Princess Irulan
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Anya Taylor-Joy
Alia Atreides
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