It goes without saying that Dune was one of the most anxiously anticipated movies to come out in 2021. Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgrd, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, and Javier Bardem are among the all-star cast members of Denis Villeneuve’s most recent feature-length adaptation of Frank Herbert’s favoured science fiction book. Villeneuve also directed Arrival and Blade Runner 2049.
Although it even goes so far as to refer to itself as Dune: Part One in the opening titles, some viewers might not be aware that this Dune is the first of two movies that adapt Frank Herbert’s huge novel. In May 2020, Villeneuve told Vanity Fair, “I would not agree to do this book adaptation into a single movie.
Update on Dune 2 Release
The fact that Blade Runner 2049, the last high-budget genre movie Villeneuve directed, had a poor box office performance is a major contributing factor to the uncertainty surrounding whether Warner Bros. would approve this sequel. The French-Canadian director even said that he had originally planned to shoot the two Dune films back-to-back, but Warner Bros. refused to let it.
On his difficult shooting schedule for his first two Dune movies, Villenueve stated the following during his interview with Christopher Nolan for the Directors Guild of America podcast.
Villeneuve expressed his displeasure with the decision in an online op-ed, writing, “Streaming can produce great content, but not movies of ‘Dune’s’ scope and scale.” Warner Bros. announced in December 2020 that all of their films in the following year, including Dune, would stream on HBO Max the same day they hit theatres. Because of Warner Bros’s action, “Dune” won’t have a chance to be profitable in order to be viable, and piracy will ultimately win. Warner Bros. may have effectively killed off the “Dune” franchise.
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Thankfully, Samba TV verified that over 1.9 million homes watched Dune: Part One throughout the course of its opening weekend.
This statistic outpaces the viewing figures for both Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical In the Heights, which was simultaneously released in theatres and only attracted 700,000 households, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which was released exclusively on streaming and attracted 1.8 million households in its first weekend.
But, this does not imply that the sci-fi epic didn’t also do well at the movie office. The first Movie adaption directed by Villeneuve made $40.1 million, which may not seem like much for a film of this size, but was actually Warner Bros‘s greatest opening weekend in 2022. The total is even more astonishing when looked at globally, coming in at $401.8 million.
Originally scheduled for publication on October 20, 2023, Dune Part Two was then postponed one month to November 17, 2023. The movie was then shifted two weeks earlier on November 3, 2023.
