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Denis Villeneuve was not supposed to make Dune: Part Three so soon after the last film. As a story that’s “inspired” by Frank Hebert’s Dune Messiah—a curious word choice that the director uses repeatedly instead of “adaptation”—the film was always destined to feature a massive time-jump of about 17 years. While Villeneuve never intended to take quite so long a break off-screen, he did have other projects lined up after 2024’s Dune: Part Two, including a new cinematic portrait of Cleopatra and an adaptation of another sci-fi book by Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Yet on Monday evening in sunny Los Angeles, he sat in an auditorium revealing alongside actors Zendaya, Javier Bardem, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Robert Pattinson the first trailer for Dune: Part Three to a roomful of press, including Den of Geek.
“When we got back, I said to my crew I’m taking a break, that’s it. Bye-bye,” the French-Canadian helmer chuckles about the around-the-world press tour of the second Dune movie. During those festivities, he traveled from Abu Dhabi to Montreal, and saw 14,000 fans line up outside a Mexico City theater that only seats 5,000. The grandiosity of the reception impressed him, particularly after the day-and-date HBO Max release of the first Dune at the tail-end of the pandemic in 2021.
“And when I went back home, I kept waking in the middle of the night with those images,” Villeneuve explains. “I was supposed to do another movie in the meantime, but the image of Dune: Part Three, inspired by Dune Messiah, kept coming back, kept coming back. And I said ‘alright, let’s do it.’”
We now have an idea of what those images in his waking eye look like, too, thanks to a spectacular new trailer which reveals a galaxy at war with itself, and an Arrakis infected with a fanaticism that borders on hysteria. The chanting wails of Hans Zimmer’s now iconic score from the last two movies likewise return, but they’re more frenzied, feverish even, while the scale of the throne room dominated by Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his extended family evokes the Pyramids of old on the Earth that was.
It’s striking since the second Dune novel on which this is based, Messiah, has long been both celebrated and criticized for its more intimate scale. One could even call it a chamber piece about courtier intrigue and betrayals in a royal palace. Yet while Villeneuve promises a very different movie from the previous two entries, he also claimed it to be the biggest Dune, as well as his most personal.
“I said to myself that it’s a good idea to come back to this world not [with a sense of] nostalgia but of urgency,” Villeneuve emphasizes. “To go there with a critical eye and not to be self-indulgent. I said to my team that it will be a very different film, a very different Dune movie, have a different tone with a different rhythm, a different pace. If the first movie was more of a contemplation about a boy discovering a new world, and the second one is a war, then this one is a thriller. It’s more action-packed and more dense, more muscular than the other two films.”
That is demonstrated by the emphasis on the entire Atreides line being on the frontline of what Herbert described on the page as Muad’Dib’s jihad and genocides (which Paul never is revealed as participating in first-hand). In the sizzle reel footage, we see both Paul and his younger sister Alia (Taylor-Joy) lead Fremen into battle on distant worlds which evoke feudal East Asian societies.
While Zimmer has returned, noticeably cinematographer Greig Fraser has not, with the DP being replaced by Linus Sandgren, the Oscar-winning lenser on La La Land, Wuthering Heights, and No Time to Die. Villeneuve talked about how the two specifically sought out the grainy texture of celluloid, intending to utilize it in both ultra-wide 70mm presentations and IMAX… at least when they aren’t in the Arraki wastes.
“We decided, both of us, to shoot most of the movie in film,” Villeneuve explains. “I haven’t shot in film in years, and we shot the film in the 65mm, most of it, a big part of it is also shot in IMAX film, a first-time for me.” However, he adds, there is one glaring exception: “I kept the desert in digital because I love the brutality of the digital IMAX. So the movie is really meant to be an IMAX experience.”
Another noticeable change is the appearance of returning actors, including Chalamet and Zendaya. The director reveals he likes using some imagination and not utilizing too many prosthetic effects when instituting a time jump. “Aging actors is more tricky,” he admits with some understatement. However, he and makeup designer Heike Merker worked to achieve “subtler ways” to suggest aging in front of the camera.
Villeneuve might be aging some familiar faces, but he’s also relying on fresh ones as well, as indicated by newcomers Pattinson and Taylor-Joy joining old Dune veterans Zendaya and Bardem at the trailer event (not counting Taylor-Joy’s cameo in Dune: Part Two). Indeed, Taylor-Joy’s character might be among the most enigmatic of Herbert’s creations, as indicated by an ethereal iconography in the trailer juxtaposed with a manic anger on the character’s face.
“Alia has a very intense blessing/curse situation,” Anya Taylor-Joy says of the younger Atreides sibling. “She carries the weight and the wisdom of generations and generations in her head. She’s never in a singular conversation, she’s kind of everything everywhere all at once. And the one thing she really feels most strongly about is her love and devotion to her brother, because that is the only person who has ever made her feel like she makes sense. He’s understood her from before she was even born, and she would do anything for him to various degrees of insanity.”
Insanity might also be another word to describe Dune as well: a world in which the idiosyncrasies and indulgences of its leaders can result in tragic consequences, no matter how well-intentioned the choices might have once been. It’s a narrative world full of ambition, sand, and a dream of greatness. Funnily enough, Villeneuve’s trilogy features all three in spades.
Dune: Part Three opens in theaters on Dec. 18, 2026.
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