With Denis Villeneuve set to depart after Dune: Messiah, a new report is claiming that Warner Bros wants Gareth Edwards for Dune 4.
Denis Villeneuve is set to exit the Dune series of movies following Dune: Messiah, the upcoming third and final entry in his trilogy of adaptations of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novels. What was unclear was what would happen to the franchise afterwards. Studio logic dictates that a series that has breached a billion dollars at the global box office in just two films must become a franchise, but Dune has always felt somewhat different. It’s clearly the work of an auteur filmmaker, making it almost impossible to keep spitting out films in the same fashion. Villeneuve’s style is simply inimitable.
Like a sand worm about to erupt from a desert, however, the signs have been visible for some time. Tie-in video games, a spin-off TV show (Dune: Prophecy) and now, another film in the ‘franchise’ seems to have been confirmed.
According to Daniel Richtman, (via Dark Horizons) Warner Bros has lined up Gareth Edwards to replace Denis Villeneuve once the latter departs the world of Dune, with Edwards likely to pick up the series with an adaptation of the next book in the series, Children Of Dune. That book largely does away with most of the characters from the trilogy so far. Whether Gareth Edwards is interested in the job isn’t yet clear, but he seems to be on the radar.
If accurate, this marks the continuation of a mighty career turnaround for Edwards, who found himself without a director’s role for years after a bruising experience working with Lucasfilm on 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Still, Edwards is far from the only filmmaker to be handled shabbily by that studio and it’s good to see him enjoying a career resurgence now, first with 2023’s The Creator and next up, Jurassic World: Rebirth, set for release this summer.
Of course, Edwards is renowned for delivering films with remarkable visual effects sequences and as such, you can see how Warner Bros might be looking at how his style will mesh well with the large-scale battles and alien technology of the Dune films.
However, given that Villeneuve has publicly dismissed Children Of Dune and Herbert’s subsequent books as being too weird for adaptation, we can’t help but wonder how significantly Edwards (or the studio) plans to alter them. (Dune: Messiah also contains some trippy ideas – so much so that it’s a wonder how Villeneuve will handle some of it.)
We’ll bring you more on this one as we hear it, but with Dune: Messiah not having gone before cameras yet, we could be waiting for some time.
