Dune: Part Three script is "in the works" according to director Denis Villeneuve

If you've never read Frank Herbert's Dune novels, there's a fair chance you walked out of this year's hit movie Dune: Part Two wondering what happened next for unwilling space messiah Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet). After overcoming the vile Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) and his sadistic nephew Feyd Rautha (Austin Butler), Paul negotiated his way into a marriage which would make him the next emperor of the known galaxy. The movie ends with his Fremen allies hopping onto a bunch of spaceships to bring his will to his subjects. It's far from an uplifting ending, which is just right for a cautionary tale like Dune.

While Part Two did leave off at more or less the exact same moment as Herbert's original book, there are a lot more Dune novels to draw from. Herbert himself wrote six, and his son Brian Herbert and co-author Kevin J. Anderson have written dozens more. We've known since long before Dune: Part Two released that director Denis Villeneuve hoped to cap off a trilogy of films by adapting the next in the series, 1969's Dune Messiah. That one covers the fallout from Paul Atriedes' rise to becoming emperor, so it's easy to imagine how it would make a fitting end to Villeneuve's series.

So far, details about a potential Dune: Part Three movie have been relatively scarce. But during an appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival this past weekend, Villeneuve gave Variety a brief tease about the script for the film. "It's in the works, yeah. That’s why I'm not staying here very long."

It sounds like work on Dune: Part Three is already well underway

That's a pretty small update, but I think there's a bit we can dig into here. Back in December of 2023, Villeneuve revealed that the screenplay for his adaptation of Dune Messiah was "almost finished." However, he also said that he was hoping to take a break from the sandswept world of Arrakis to work on a smaller film before he started production on it. “I might make a detour before just to go away from the sun. For my mental sanity I might do something in between, but my dream would be to go a last time on this planet that I love," he said.

A screenplay, for the record, is one step above a script in terms of production; it often also includes stage directions and stuff like that. So it sounds like Dune: Part Three was already mostly through the initial script phase even back then. I'd guess Villeneuve's latest comment was either just an on-the-fly response, or the Part Three dialogue is perhaps getting a bit more polish now that Part Two is actually out.

Villeneuve's hope for a break may have been cut short after Dune: Part Two released, though. “We’re all actively engaged in Dune: Part Three. That’s what I’ll say for right now,” Legendary Pictures CEO Josh Grode told Entertainment Weekly barely a week after Part Two had released in theaters. A few months later, Deadline reported that Legendary's parent company Warner Bros. Discovery had blocked off December 2026 for a "Denis Villeneuve Film Event," which they reasonably believed was probably Dune: Part Three. It sounds like we'll be going back to Arrakis sooner rather than later.

Villeneuve also spoke a bit about the "very moving" audience response to Dune: Part Two. "When I did Part One and when it was released, it was at the end of the pandemic so I didn't have the chance to be in contact with the audience," the director said. "So when we did the tour for Part Two we felt the joy and the appetite for a second film, that really went straight to my heart to see how much people were waiting for the film and ready to love it."

Now I'm ready to love Dune: Part Two all over again. You can watch it on Max. There's also a new Dune prequel series slated to drop on the streaming platform this November, titled Dune: Prophecy, which will explore the formation of the Bene Gesserit centuries before the birth of Paul Atreides.

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h/t GamesRadar+