Denis Villeneuve will direct another film before Dune 3, for his “mental health”

We will have to wait before The Messiah of Dune: in the meantime, the director describes the second part as “much better” than the first.

Postponed due to the writers’ and actors’ strike, Dune: Part Two is only scheduled for February 28, 2024 but is already one of the most anticipated films of next year. At a press conference in South Korea, Denis Villeneuve spoke about this second part, which he found more successful than the first: “For me, this film is much better than Part 1. There is something more alive (…) I tried to create an intensity and a quality of emotion that I did not achieve with Part 1 but which I managed to reach in Part 2.”

The director of Sicario And First contact also took the opportunity to confirm its ambition to produce a third part: “If I manage to make a trilogy, that would be the dream. I will say that there are words on paper (for a third film)” (via Empire). The third film would be an adaptation of the novel The Messiah of Dunethe second novel in the saga written by Frank Herbert (both Dune films adapting the first novel). “It’s being written, the script is almost finished. It’s going to take a little time… There is this dream of making a third film… that would be obvious to me” he declared during the press conference.

However, after having completed the first two films in the science fiction saga without any pause, the filmmaker grants himself the right to branch off towards another project. “I don’t know yet when I will return to Arrakis. I’ll probably take a detour to get away from the sun for a bit. For my sanity, I would probably do something in between” announces the director. It was also recently declared that he was working on a science fiction film in collaboration with the screenwriter Eric Roth (who wrote the screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon), perhaps the cinema version of the novel Meeting with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, the author of the book 2001, A Space Odyssey.

Let’s already enjoy the upcoming release of Dune: Part 2 before waiting for the Messiah. The second part extends its star cast, since alongside Timothée Chalamet And Zendaya are added Austin Butler, Florence Pugh And Léa Seydoux. The film is released in French theaters on February 28, 2024.

Denis Villeneuve hired Eric Roth for a secret “space and time” project