Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation was, along with Daniel Craig’s last Bond outing in No Time to Die, probably the most anticipated movie of the year. The movie finally hit theaters worldwide and was simultaneously released on HBO Max in the United States. Dune stars Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides, Zendaya as Chani, Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica, Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto Atreides, Stellan Skarsgård as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, Javier Bardem as Stilgar, Chang Chen as Dr. Wellington Yueh, Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Dr. Liet Kynes, Charlotte Rampling as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dave Bautista as Glossu Rabban, David Dastmalchian as Piter De Vries, Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho, Stephen Henderson as Thufir Hawat and Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck. The movie’s star-filled cast did an amazing job and the movie is considered by both fans and critics to be a masterpiece, which, of course, prompted talks about a sequel.
Dune adapts only part of Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction classic and it ends with a cliffhanger which made a sequel absolutely necessary. And while Villeneuve had already started working on the script for Dune: Part 2 but the studio wasn’t ready to commit to a sequel until they saw how Dune fared among the viewers. On October 26, 2021, though, Legendary Pictures officially confirmed a sequel via their Twitter profile, which was absolutely great news.
Villeneuve had expressed his optimism about a sequel and even a potential trilogy earlier this year: “There’s no such thing as Dune 1 and Dune 2. It’s Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two. We have been hearing in the past few decades that it’s not possible to adapt this book, and that it’s an impossible task. I think that in the back of the mind of the studio, it’s still the same! So the first thing was to prove that there was a beautiful, popular movie that can exist, and I think that I proved that – everybody at Warner Bros and Legendary, they are 100 percent behind the project. They feel that it would need a really bad outcome at the box office to not have a Dune: Part Two, because they love the movie. They are proud of the movie, so they want the movie to move forward. And they still did half of it. So, you know, I’m very optimistic.”
Now that we finally have a confirmation, we can enjoy the first part of the movie even more, knowing that another masterpiece by Villeneuve is waiting just around the corner.