Zendaya is already down for Dune: Part Three

Dune: Part Two, the continuing story of outer space desert messiah Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), arrives in theaters soon, and the hype is building. Advance tickets went on sale Friday, and there are reports that AMC's website crashed from the excess of demand. The first Dune movie, which adapted the first half of Frank Herbert's classic 1965 sci-fi novel, was very good. The second, which will bring the story home, looks even better. We could be looking at the first mega-smash movie of 2024.

The outlook is so rosy that Warner Bros. Discovery is hoping to turn Dune into a franchise. They already have a TV show in the works for Max — Dune: Prophecy — and Dune director Denis Villeneuve has talked more than once about adapting Frank Herbert's sequel to Dune, Dune Messiah, as a movie, which would result in a good old-fashioned trilogy.

“I'm working on four different screenplays -- I know that Dune Messiah will be one of them," Villeneuve said during an interview with Cine21. "My job was to try to keep the spirit of Frank Herbert alive as much as possible -- the whole meaning of Dune becomes clear with Dune Messiah."

I won't spoil things, but Dune Messiah does follow up directly on the events of Dune, and rather complicates them. Responses were divided when the book first came out way back in 1969, and I'd be very curious to see how modern would respond to an adaptation, especially after watching what looks like an action corker in Dune: Part Two.

That said, it sounds like the cast is in, or at least that's what Zendaya — who plays Paul's love interest Chani — told Fandango during a group interview. “Would we be down? I mean of course,” she said. “Any time Denis calls it’s a yes from me. I’m excited to see what happens."

Zendaya has even read ahead a bit: "I started Messiah and I was like, ‘Woah, I’m only shooting the first movie. Let me just go back to the first one.’ It’s so much to take in, but there’s no better hands with better care and love for it than Denis."

Austin Butler's version of Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen is "more brutal"

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Dune: Part Two is coming out in a few weeks, so we should get excited for that before we start thinking about Part Three.

In addition to the returns of Chalamet and Zendaya, Dune: Part Two will feature several new big-name actors in important roles, including Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, the nephew of the vile Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) who wiped out Paul's family in the first movie. Feyd-Rautha will be a huge rival to Paul in Part Two. Previously, the role was played by Sting in director David Lynch's 1984 adaptation of Dune, where Frey-Rautha was introduced like this:

Butler is familiar with that with that version, but don't expect a repeat. “I'd already seen the film and I love David Lynch so much, and I'm a huge fan of Sting, so obviously, I really admire that,” he told Inverse. “But they're just completely different films, so that's one of the great joys is they can exist as two completely separate things. But I love Sting, for sure.”

We can already spot some major differences between the two versions of the character, even ignoring the space underwear. For one, Sting's version of Feyd-Rautha has a full head of hair, whereas Butler's version if "ugly and bald," as he told Josh Horowitz of the Happy Sad Confused podcast. In playing Frey-Rautha, Butler said he drew inspiration from “animals, like a snake and a shark." He researched "certain cultures through time that have been bred in brutality. Because that’s the thing, I was trying to find — I didn’t want to play a caricature of him, but what does somebody become when they’re born in brutality? And they must act with violence in order to survive. Who does that person become?”

"He's more brutal. We leaned into the brutality of the life that he grew up in and how that makes you interact with the world with a vicious nature."

I will say, I never pictured Feyd-Rautha as looking quite so monstrous as he does in Dune: Part Two. In the books, he's fairly charismatic in addition to being violent and deadly, and while it's possible to be charismatic while also looking like an angry cue ball, it wasn't what popped into my head when reading.

We'll see what Butler does with the role when Dune: Part Two opens in theaters on March 1.

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h/t ScreenRant, Variety, PEOPLE