Timothée Chalamet is opening up on what to expect with Dune: Part Three, which may be the wildest entry in the saga yet!
Dune was a massive gamble when it opened in 2021. Previous attempts to adapt Frank Herbert’s sci-fi masterpiece had been mixed (a 2000 Sci-Fi Channel mini-series) to divisive (David Lynch’s 1984 film). However, Denis Villeneuve pulled it off as Dune was a massive hit with critics and audiences alike. The 2024 follow-up adapted the second half of the first novel to equal acclaim.
It was inevitable that a third film would come around to finish off that trilogy. As has been the case in the past, Chalamet has been mostly quiet and failed to give too much away about the project, but he recently gifted fans with some fun updates. When speaking with Matthew McConaughey at Variety and CNN’s town hall event at the University of Texas at Austin in February, the actor dropped some hints of what to expect.
“What I think you see at the end of the second one, and across the third one, is yourself in Interstellar and Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight and Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now and stuff like that. Actually, wait, let me rephrase all of that! Hold up. I cannot put myself in that same boat. Let’s just say, it’s these big movies where you could sneak in something. A curveball.”
The third film is expected to adapt Dune: Messiah, picking up with Paul now Emperor for a decade and hoping to give the Fremen their freedom. However, Paul is faced with challenges from the Bene Gesserit, Spacing Guild, and Tleilaxu uniting to his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), making her own plans to Paul’s own children working against each other. There’s also his love, Chani (Zendaya), who ended the second film walking out on Paul rather than following him.
It’s likely the movie will make some alterations to the original text (in the novels, Chani stays by Paul’s side even when he’s married to Irulan), with Chalamet pushing the eerie tone.
“Especially on this third one, all the great s— you see on screen is from freedom of movement and freedom of choice. And with Denis, we really had a good rhythm. It’s the eeriest one. It’s a big swing.”
The movie is expected to premiere in December, but then, it wouldn’t be a shock if there’s a delay. The first film was to debut in 2020, only to be delayed a year by the COVID-19 pandemic. Likewise, Chapter Two was to arrive in December of 2023, only to be delayed until the following March due to the 2023 Hollywood strikes. Given the massive amount of special effects involved, it will have to race to make the planned date.
Chalmaet is still hopeful for the film’s debut, as he also hints this will be his last go-around as Paul in the saga. While there can be future installments, Paul’s story basically concluded in Messiah.
“I didn’t want to be complacent about a single moment. Everything was sacred, and it was my last time doing a ‘Dune’ film, so I really wanted to treat it as sacred. Because people can get complacent, but I was more intense on the third one. It felt like that was the natural momentum, so I wanted to push against that as hard as I could.”
So fans can be sure that Dune: Part Three will be the most epic yet in an already-epic saga that does justice to this sci-fi landmark.
Dune: Part Three scheduled to premiere December 18, 2026.