Denis Villeneuve has just released his new movie Dune and gotten the greenlight for the sequel, but the French-Canadian director already has some spice-y ideas to make it a trilogy. As he told The Hollywood Reporter, he hopes to base the third flick on Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah.
“If things go well with Part Two, I could foresee the idea of maybe doing a third movie, Dune Messiah,” he said. “That would make sense to me.”
The 1969 Messiah is set 12 years after 1965’s Dune. Without delving too far into spoilers — but still, minor spoilers to follow — it finds Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet in the films) struggling with the intersection of religion and bureaucracy, focused on his family and trying to reject his own deification.
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Villeneuve hinted at this in his interview. “Frank Herbert wrote Dune as a warning towards those messianic figures, those chosen ones, those savior figures,” he said. “It’s about how dangerous those kinds of figures can be. It’s a criticism of the messianic figure.”
The director has even allowed his imagination to stretch beyond a third Dune movie, though he plans to explore other mythologies. “After that, I think that I will make some other movies; let’s call them big movies regarding their ambition and scope. And later on, when I’m too tired to do that, I will go back to some smaller projects. But for now, I have the energy to do this.”
Dune Part Two is due out in October 2023, and Villeneuve expects to start filming it next fall.
