Directors can spend huge chunks of their career chasing dream projects. Just recently Martin Scorsese finally saw the release of Silence after he’d been trying to get the movie made for decades. Arrival director Denis Villeneuve won’t have to wait nearly that long to tackle his dream project, though: he is officially directing Dune.
Villeneuve is obviously on a huge hot streak right now. Not only did Arrival just earn a whole host of Oscar nominations, including for Best Director, but he’s working on Blade Runner 2029. You’d think that’d be enough to scratch his science fiction itch, but as Villeneuve revealed in September of 2016, Dune was a white whale project he thought he’d never be able to land. Jump to November of 2016 and news hits that Legendary Pictures had locked down the rights to Dune.
And here we are, just six months after Villeneuve let the world know he dreamed of letting the spice flow, with confirmation from Brian Herbert, who became the shepherd of the Dune franchise after his father Frank Herbert passed away in 1986, that Legendary and Villenueve have signed on the dotted line to make Dune together.
We don’t have any further details right now, though it’s worth pointing out that Herbert’s tweet refers to a “new Dune series film project,” so this definitely isn’t a TV show, as some speculated may have been Legendary’s intentions when they bought the rights to this truly sprawling sci-fi series about interstellar power struggles and, most importantly, giant sandworms.