House of the Dragon! The Last of Us! Penguin! HBO, once the champion of innovative TV shows that bucked current trends and started new ones, has embraced big IP. Will the network be able to wrangle this beast and elevate the material with its patented brand of HBO polish, or will it start to look more like other big studios chasing franchise gold?
So far it's working pretty well, what with The Last of Us being one of the most celebrated shows of 2023 and House of the Dragon current tearing through its second season. But I still ask myself these kinds of question when I see a new trailer for something like Dune: Prophecy, a prequel to the very successful Dune movies from writer-director Denis Villeneuve. Watch it above!
This new show is set thousands of years before the birth of Paul Atreides, and revolves around two Harkonnen sisters (Emily Watson and Olivia Williams) trying to establish the influential Bene Gesserit sect. Travis Fimmel, Jodhi May, Mark Strong, and others also star, so the show doesn't lack for excellent acting talent.
The show draws on the book Sisterhood of Dune, written by Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert , the son of original Dune author Frank Herbert. It's set some time after the Butlerian jihad, a humans-vs-robots war that resulting in a society very skeptical about thinking machines, but still long before the Dune story most of us know. Sisterhood of Dune is part of a trilogy where nascent organizations like the Bene Gesserit, the Mentats and the Guild Navigators struggle against the Butlerians, who are anti-technology to a fanatical, dangerous degree. I can almost see the think pieces about how the show reflects our relationship with generative AI now...
We don't have a release date for Dune: Prophecy just yet, although we know it's coming in November. Meanwhile, word is that Denis Villenueve's next Dune movie, an adaptation of the book Dune Messiah, is coming in 2026. Warner Bros. Discovery wants us to keep Arrakis top of mind through the years. That's how you run a franchise, after all.
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