IMAX confirms that Denis Villeneuve’s Dune 3 is to release in 2026, though there might be a question mark over its Dune: Messiah title…
If you download this PDF report from the Q2 2024 IMAX Investor Presentation, there are charts showing which films are being produced with IMAX in mind all the way through to the end of 2026.
Whatever the name ends up being I’m just glad they’re confident enough in a script that they can call a release date.
The books after the first one really go off the rails. I look forward to them trying to sell a movie about Paul’s ridiculous transformation.
You mean Leto II? That’s not till the end of children.
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Messiah is him loosing is eyes and walking around with holes in his face creeping people out.
Hope you’re enjoying it, it’s my favourite of the series but I enjoy the philosophy pondering in that book. I can see why it’s not for many readers though, and if Dune was hard to film I couldn’t imagine trying to do that book without voiceovers of Leeto for more runtime than most studios and viewers would like.
Just finished the re-read of God Emperor and am now onto heretics. I’m here to tell you that it just keeps getting weirder. And, oddly, hornier.
Dune Messiah has a lot going for it, like the inner workings of palace intrigue and some fantastic elements of world-building (a prime example being the Tleilaxu and their biological tech).
There’s also Irulan becoming a key character, her Bene Gesserit POV has a ton and a half of cinematic potential, especially with Florence Pugh at the helm.
But how do you make that Paul and Chani arc satisfying for broad audiences? Also and maybe particularly for reader fans, with how much Denis changed Chani’s character from the first book. And even though Paul is galactic emperor, the scale of the story and events does feel smaller than in the first book, there are no new true paradigm shifts.
Things don’t get swashbuckling and truly epic again until Children Of Dune, which I loved.
IMHO Villeneuve has made two damn near perfect Dune films so far, roll on the next.
People get hung up on deviations from the books. Duh, it’s a different medium. That’s like complaining that a painting of a sculpture doesn’t capture the far side of the sculpture.
The second one put me to sleep.
Legit it felt like an extended montage, not a movie.
I wanted to like it so much.
I never find movies boring unless they are straight up bad. Slow pace doesn’t bore me at all.
It wasn’t the pace being slow, it’s that instead of content being present - the viewer is left to fill in the details of what has happened. I watched it more than once to capture all of the film. The narrative, in my opinion, skims the surface of what’s going on. We skip large parts of the story.
So it looks like Denis is confident with completing the screenplay now, instead of making another film first.
could its title be something other than Dune: Messiah?
He did adjust the story in Dune 2 to better align with Dune: Messiah but it also shows he is no respecter of the original stories, so he might still take things in a different direction, especially as Messiah is, in some ways a darker reaction to the success of Dune and it is unclear how well that would translate into a blockbuster movie. However, it may be Villeneuve has the confidence of the studios and will be given the room to make an… “anti-blockbuster”.
Maybe he’ll try to combine the next two together? I haven’t finished Messiah yet or finished the third one, but I heard it makes a good trilogy?
Children of Dune kinda starts the second arc of the story as it moves away from Paul. Messiah alone should wrap up the story well enough. If Children gets adapted, it’ll probably be told together with God-Emperor, maybe even as one movie.
