‘Completely unfilmable’: the Dune universe is about to get weird

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two is currently the toast of Tinseltown, a big-budget sci-fi adventure directed by a Hollywood A-lister and critical darling that has taken the box office by storm and left fans wanting more and more and more. It made more than $180m worldwide in its first weekend alone and inevitably, sequels beckon. Why shouldn’t they, given that Frank Herbert wrote five sequels to his original 1965 tome and Villeneuve has spent the best part of five and a half hours just covering that first book?

Related: Dune: Part Two: new villain, more worms, another cliffhanger – discuss with spoilers

Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as that. For this is not Lord of the Rings, an epic trilogy with clear character arcs, a linear central quest and little prospect of sequels once ole Sméagol topples into Mount Doom and destroys the One Ring. Nor is it the original Star Wars, which smartly ends with the defeat of the Empire and (until they ruined everything with the prequel trilogy) the sense that everyone will now live happily ever after. This is Dune, a six-book epic stretched over thousands of years and dozens of planets in which major protagonists transform into giant human-sandworm hybrids, sexy witches try to use their auto-pulsing vaginas to (literally) conquer mankind and major characters keep being brought back from the dead as zombie-clone-stooge versions of their past selves. It is beyond weird, and there is a very good reason Villeneuve himself has so far only committed (and it is a very loose committal) to adapting Herbert’s second novel, Dune: Messiah, after this one.

Imagine for a moment that Dune were Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. The next film is going to be the equivalent of seeing Luke Skywalker decide at the end of Return of the Jedi to take up his dear old black death cyborg dad’s mantle and send the rebels screaming across the known galaxy in a religious war that kills billions of innocent people across the cosmos. It will be like seeing Frodo Baggins decide that he doesn’t want to head to the Undying Lands after all, but would rather sit up in Sauron’s dark tower as his myriad goblin armies cover the whole of Middle Earth in darkness. As Villeneuve himself told Empire: “Dune: Messiah was written in reaction to the fact that people perceived Paul Atreides as a hero, which is not what [author Frank Herbert] wanted to do. My adaptation is closer to his idea that it’s actually a warning.”

If you’ve seen Dune: Part Two (and read the books) you’ll be aware that the Canadian film-maker has rewritten the story somewhat to throw shade at Paul Atreides’ (Timothée Chalamet) sudden rise to unstoppable power by the end of the tale. Zendaya’s Chani is not the doting Fremen lover that she continues to be throughout the books, and even ends the film riding away from her beau into the sunset onboard a giant sandworm. There’s a suggestion here that Villeneuve might shift the narrative even further in the next movie, perhaps even making Chani the leader of the resistance to Paul’s preposterous galaxy-spanning power. Though that would be a huge change indeed.

Contrary to Herbert’s original narrative, Villeneuve has also chosen not to deliver a version of Paul’s sister Alia as a mega-witch of the Bene Gesserit cult who has full adult faculties, not to mention ridiculously prescient and omniscient capabilities, from the moment she is born. Instead she is shown in adult form (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) as a vision of the future (we also hear her voice as the unborn child communicates telepathically with her own mother, which certainly seems to have backfired in the weirdness stakes if it was some sort of attempt to dampen down the original book’s freakshow vibes).

So where is this all leading? Villeneuve is keeping his cards close to his chest, other than to hint that Paul’s powers of prescience regarding the future survival of the human race across the stars will be at the centre of his thinking regarding Dune: Part 3. “I think you cannot avoid Paul’s terrible purpose, that’s the structure of this whole enterprise,” he told Den of Geek recently. “Saying this, I do not like to comment on Dune Messiah because I’m writing it, and when I’m writing, I love to shut up because it’s a very delicate time where things are fragile, ideas evolve. I like to talk about movies when they are alive, finished, and strong enough to walk by themselves. Dune Messiah is barely an embryo.”

Rumour is that the film-maker will not even start work filming part three until he has finished another movie project, so it is likely to be at least 2027 before we see the film in cinemas. This could be an advantage because Dune: Messiah takes place 12 years after the events of the first book, which would allow time for the cherubic Chalamet and his fellow cast-members to age just a little bit. After that, Villeneuve himself has described future books in the series as “esoteric” and implied that he is not willing to adapt them.

Part of the issue here is that everything that has made Dune parts one and two so fascinatingly different from other science fiction and fantasy fare over the past few decades is exactly the same nutty, psychedelic spice of cosmic life that eventually sends the series of books into utterly bonkers and completely unfilmable territory. Villeneuve has so far delivered a common-or-garden story of epic revenge, a tale as old as time in which the scion of a defeated family rises up and takes out the very bad guys who destroyed everyone he loved in the first place. One of the reasons Dune on the big screen is more interesting than that sounds is to do with the pepperings of highly enjoyable mystical nonsense that keep popping up to add kick to the recipe. Unfortunately the further the books go down that particular psychedelic rabbit hole, the more it is impossible to imagine them on the big screen.

And yet, this is going to happen. Just listen to the Legendary Entertainment CEO, Josh Grode, salivating over the prospect of more deserty space goodness. “I think everybody is very excited and really enjoying this moment and if Denis gets the script right and he feels that he can deliver another experience on par with what we’ve just completed then I don’t see why not,” he told CNBC.

While Grode is referring to an adaptation of Dune: Messiah, there’s already a creeping sense that the more people go to see this thing, the more chance Hollywood won’t allow the show to end there. But perhaps, like Herbert’s concept of the Golden Path (a single vision of the future where everything works out for mankind, despite a huge body count, among millions where we all end up dead) there is a solution.

Related: Dune v Dune: do Denis Villeneuve’s films stay true to the book?

After all, Dune is so intriguingly left-of-centre as sci-fi due to its emphasis on (what is basically) magic over technology, of an obsession with arcane cosmic enigmas – the bloodline-tinkering of the Bene Gesserit, the freaky resurrection techniques of the Bene Tleilax – instead of a focus on the inevitable rise of the machines that usually permeates such fare. There is an awful lot of good in-universe stuff going on here that could be used for future movies that don’t follow the path of the books, but do hold true to the kind of sensible narrative structures that have helped Dune: parts one and two prove so watchable. And Villeneuve is already tinkering with the text.

Surely if enough of us get together and protest this, we can stop it happening, and get future books adapted via far-out animation or multiple-season TV shows instead. Legendary’s television arm is already putting together a prequel series, Dune: Prophecy, that will explore the origins of the Bene Gesserit – so there’s room for inter-media manoeuvre here. It cannot be that just turning up in our thousands to watch a really, really good sci-fi movie means we deserve the horrors to come if Dune books three to six actually do end up on the big screen (possibly with a far less skilled film-maker than Villeneuve in the director’s chair).

Perhaps we don’t all need to drink the Electric Kool-Aid and start fusing our life essence with sandworm larvae, or hanging out with weird sexy witches who have the power to control men with their naughty bits. And yet, I have a nagging feeling that the more the box office greenbacks keep rolling in, the more chance we will be.

• This article was amended on 7 March 2024 because while Frank Herbert’s son Brian Herbert has written sequels to Dune, an earlier version intended to refer to Frank as having written “five sequels to his original 1965 tome”.