Dune Will Be the Last Blockbuster We Will Ever Need
Of the remaining Big Six studios, Warner Brothers is likely my favorite. Please don’t misunderstand, it has its baggage. After all, it’s second only to Disney in terms of pure conglomeration but its ties to the studio days of yore, as well as my indoctrination into the cult of WB as a child via KidsWB and Cartoon Network, have made the company’s expansion into media domination more palatable than Disney’s or ComcastNBCUniversal’s. If I had to pick a multinational media conglomerate to be a nasty little paypig for, it would be the Brothers Warner.
It helps that unlike Comcast’s Universal Pictures, Viacom’s Paramount Pictures, Sony’s Columbia Pictures or uh, Disney (a victory for mom-and-pop operations everywhere, I am assured), AT&T’s Warner Bros plays its looser with its hundred-million dollar investments. Case and point, the studio is responsible for two of the best genre blockbusters of the decade in Mad Max: Fury Road and Blade Runner 2049. Now of course, it wasn’t due to the studio’s benevolence that they were good, but at the end of the day, some hero greenlit a $170 million budget for a Blade Runner sequel and some absolute putz looked at the books and was like “yeah, it’ll break even.” And now, against all odds, they’re letting Denis Villeneuve, who lost them so much money on the aforementioned Blade Runner 2049, spend even more money on a two-part Dune adaptation.
Now, that’s not to say that other companies don’t make absurd gambles. Universal Pictures is unsurpassed in the art of making the worst investments in Hollywood. That studio just sank close to $100 million into an eye-searing adaptation of Cats and burned $170 million on a fucking Dolittle movie like we live in 1960 and not 2020. And all that came after a decade of stinkers like Mortal Engines, Welcome to Marwen, or that Mummy reboot (anyone here remember the Dark Universe?). Universal are practically league champs at making the goddamn worst tripe that no one would pay to see. How they pull it off year after year and stay afloat is a question for the IRS before it’s a question for me.
As much as anyone not buying burial plots at Magic Kingdom hates to think about it, Dune absolutely could end up in the blockbuster hall of shame, if not next to Cats and Dolittle, than next to Valerian and Jupiter Ascending. It’s happened before. Alejandro Jodorowsky couldn’t even get his version into production, although that has more to do with his compulsive spending habits than it did with much else. The first finished adaptation, made by David Lynch and Dino De Laurentiis, released in 1984, at the tail end of the Star Wars’ imitation cycle. While the studio had given Lynch the director’s chair, they did not give him the keys to editing room. The result is charmingly dark, fairly hokey, and packed to the brim with absolute legends hamming it up (Kyle MacLachlan as Paul! Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck! Brad Dourif as Piter! Fucking STING as Feyd!), but it can only ever really be seen as the massive critical and commercial flop that it was. Lynch has confessed to being more interested in the dream sequences in the book rather than the narrative and the world, and the studios were even less interested in making something as boundary-pushing as the book.
The fact of the matter is they didn’t try to make Dune, not really, they kept the basic plot beats, but smoothed over the themes with silly action sequences and stoic narration. The vibe the studios attempted was akin to Star Wars, but with a Dune coat of paint. “Well what’s the difference?” I hear you say “They’re both space movies with laser guns on desert planets.” Here’s the difference, Dune is weird. Not “trippy” visuals, “quirky” characters, Whedon-verse “weird.” It’s that depressing kind of weird you will never get from Hollywood blockbusters. Here is a brief list of some of the completely batshit things that happen in Dune:
Spoilers for a half-century old book ahead.
- The main villain is a aristocratic pedophile who is so fat he needs anti-gravity engines to help him move around, he also wants to have sex with the book’s main character and also his own nephew and heir, both of whom are like 15.
- There’s a cult of eugenicist space nuns who’ve been undertaking a centuries-long project to produce a godchild via selective breeding of noble families.
- Computers are banned due to a war between humans and machines centuries ago, so now we breed and train special people with the power to serve as human computers.
- Everyone’s addicted to a drug that makes you immortal and in large quantities turns you into a mutant capable of warping time and space but it only comes from one planet.
- Human civilization has become so technologically advanced and socially regressive we’ve reverted to corporate feudalism and planet-scale colonialism.
- The feudal-capitalist oligarchs are fucking miserable. They’re constantly living in fear of being wiped out by the machinations of some other noble house who wants their worlds and the accompanying enterprises.
- There are laser weapons and noble families have their own personal nukes but they’re basically useless because everyone has their own personal shields, so basically all combat is done with swords and knives. Not laser knives, just good old cold steel, how futuristic.
- The main character and ostensible hero of the story, having become functionally omniscient, realizes about halfway through the book that if he keeps going on the path he’s on he’ll eventually start a galaxy-spanning religious war that will kill trillions and then he just kinda shrugs, puts it off for later and keeps going.
There’s either hubris or bravery in looking at the failed attempts before you and deciding “yeah we can make it work, cut Villeneuve the check,” but whichever it is I have to respect it. Someone needs to take these kinds of risks. Whereas Disney has made its money bankrolling samey sequels to worldwide phenomenons, and Paramount has made its pocket change on Tom Cruise’s suicide missions and Transformers, Warner Bros has allowed its directors to pursue weirdo passion projects. Maybe it’s the presence of Christopher Nolan, whose Batman trilogy provided enough goodwill for like, twelve fucking atrocious DC superhero movies, that gives the studio the entirely unwarranted confidence to make these movies. Sometimes they’re successful. Fury Road and Dunkirk both did big numbers at the box office and were rightfully nominated for Best Picture. I’m sure Tenet will do numbers this summer. But guys, Blade Runner and Dune? Are you guys making Neuromancer next? Left Hand of Darkness? I’ll go see them, but I can’t promise anyone else will.
Based on the cast list alone, I am sold on this Dune movie. If you like your handsome dudes, you’ve got Timothee Chalamet playing Paul Atreides and Oscar Isaac playing his father. If you like dudes who are just fuckin’ cool, you’ve got Dave Bautista, Jason Momoa, and Javier Bardem. If you like Zendaya, well, Zendaya’s in the movie. And if you like character actors who are primed to break into the big time in the 2020s, give David Dastmalchian a chance.
We will see if this attempt at a new Dune movie runs with the same themes as Frank Herbert’s original novel. Both Lynch’s version and Jodorowsky’s abandoned version forsake the themes of the book; in favor of what the studio wanted in the case of Lynch, and in favor of LSD-enhanced egomania in the case of Jodorowsky. Dune accurately recognizes the truth in political power struggles, depicting how power can not just corrupt, but how it can be misinterpreted and weaponized by supporters and enemies alike. It is the ultimate subversion of the protagonist’s tale. For anyone who wanted to theorize about where Daenerys’s or Jon’s morals were going to fall at the end of Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, Dune got there in a single book. If we got a version that was both faithful to the book and an engaging watch, I would never need another blockbuster again.
The amount of freedom Villeneuve is given and how willing he is to really run with the all-encompassing weirdness of his source material will play a huge part in determining the fate of the new Dune. How much of a himbo will Jason Momoa’s Duncan Idaho be? How outlandish will the costuming and set design be? How much license will Stellan Skarsgard have to chew scenery and be delightfully campy as Baron Harkonnen? How much is Oscar Isaac going to be allowed to flex his hard-sci-fi actor muscles after a half-decade of being directionless in the Disney Star Wars machine? Who the hell is gonna be Feyd? Are we actually gonna get Part Two?
Embracing the singular nature of Dune will go a long way towards helping Villeneuve and his endlessly talented cast create something truly memorable and mold-breaking in a blockbuster landscape that’s been weighed down by unimaginative CGI, stale quips, and the curse of event film mandatory fun. It doesn’t feel absurd to be hopeful about this one. Even if you hate Blade Runner 2049, one has to admit, it keeps the beat of the original film quite well. And even if you hate Mad Max: Fury Road — which you don’t, you don’t exist — there is a certain amount of respect you have to give to the creative team behind it for not dumbing down the action, the world, or trying to annualize it or market it to a general audience. Dune demands a similar adherence to a niche set of ideas and ideals, it also demands a massive budget. I can think of few studio-filmmaker teams better equipped, both financially and creatively, to handle the demands of a Dune movie than the Villeneuve-WB partnership.
