Blade Runner 2049 came out in 2017. Since that movie’s release, Denis Villeneuve has been locked into his Dune trilogy, with the third movie arriving in December. For the first time in a decade, he’ll be leaving Arrakis behind, but he has a high-profile next chapter already lined up. Extremely high-profile. The first James Bond movie of the Amazon MGM era, featuring an as-yet-to-be-named new actor playing 007. According to Villeneuve, that’s exactly what he needed after wrapping his epic sci-fi series.
In a new interview with Empire, Villeneuve said shifting from sandworms to spies is truly his ideal situation. “I thought, ‘When it’s done, I need a very powerful rocket to pull me away from Arrakis.’ When I was asked to do the next Bond, I said: ‘Okay, this is what I need.'”
He also admitted, “I’m tired of it,” and he channeled that Dune weariness into his creativity: “I want to make sure that I will be severe with the material. That I will not be complacent.”
Even though the Dune movies are obviously closely interlinked, the director teased that Dune: Part Three will be distinctive from the previous entries.
“The idea was to try to make a movie that will have the same DNA—it’s a Dune movie—but it’s a very different movie,” Villeneuve said.
The pacing is different, an older Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is different, and “the world has totally changed. Their psyches, their perspective on reality has totally changed, and Paul is living with the burden of what he created, trying to find a way out of this spiral of violence.”
Dune: Part Three also stars Zendaya, Jason Momoa, Florence Pugh, Rebecca Ferguson, Isaach de Bankolé, Charlotte Rampling, Robert Pattinson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Josh Brolin, and Javier Bardem. It opens December 18.
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