In Laman's Terms: The Recent Dune Reboots That Never Happened

OK, now imagine this image came from a Dune movie directed by the Taken guy and it's Alex Pettyfer and Adelaide Kane playing Paul and Chani, respectively 

Today, the modern Dune movies have become as synonymous with director Denis Villeneuve as the Dark Knight trilogy was intertwined with Christopher Nolan or Barbie is with Greta Gerwig. It’s not just that Villeneuve pulled off this adaptation that seemed impossible, but like Nolan and Gerwig, he delivered a big-budget blockbuster that also felt like it could only come from the mind of one particular auteur. In the wake of Villeneuve’s increasingly famous take on the Dune mythology in cinema, it’s easy to sometimes forget about the other filmed adaptations of Dune, like David Lynch’s 1984 movie or that Syfy miniseries at the dawn of the 21^st century.

Even beyond those two pre-2021 projects, though, Hollywood has also tried gallantly many times to turn this project into a big blockbuster. Of course, turning Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi text into a cohesive movie is not an easy task…just ask Alejandro Jodorowsky! In the 21^st century, countless studios tried their hand at turning Dune into a motion picture before Villeneuve finally cracked the code and got this production off the ground. Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya turned out to be perfect choices to anchor Dune…but how else could a modern-day Dune movie have looked? What other ambitions for a Dune feature were once set to flow into movie theaters?

The Earliest 21^st Century Stabs at “Dune” Movies

At the very end of 2007, news broke on the prospect of Dune finally riding back into movie theaters more than two decades after Lynch's Dune movie debuted. For context on how long ago this was, the FirstShowing news piece about this development begins with the writer noting that they'd rather be exploring their new HD DVD player than writing up news about a 21^st century Dune adaptation! This version of the text was supposed to be directed by Peter Berg, with the filmmaker describing himself as a massive fan of the book who planned to make a spectacularly expansive adaptation of the source material. At the time, Berg’s inaugural foray into big-budget blockbuster cinema (Hancock) was still months away from release, so it was still unclear to the general public if the man behind Friday Night Lights could handle a VFX-heavy feature.

By March 2008, Berg was officially onboard as the director and the project had a studio home: Paramount Pictures. While Universal Pictures had released the original Lynch Dune, Paramount was now eagerly holding onto Berg’s Dune as a movie that could keep up the studio’s blockbuster movie momentum. Thanks to deals and purchases it had made with outfits like Marvel Studios and DreamWorks SKG, Paramount was riding high in the late 2000s on projects like Transformers, Iron Man, and others. Paramount wanted to keep the good box office times rolling and that meant taking a chance on adapting a source material others may have found impenetrable.  By October 2009, though, Berg had departed the project due to disagreements over budget with Paramount (who wanted to keep costs under $175 million). At the time, the two candidates Paramount was most eagerly eyeballing to take over the proceedings were Neill Blomkamp and Neil Marshall, the former of whom had just helmed the lucrative Distinct 9.

In the wake of Berg’s departure came inarguably the darker period of development for a modern-day Dune reboot: the moment Pierre Morel was slated to direct the feature. Interestingly, Morel and final Dune director Denis Villeneuve are both of French ancestry (the former being purely French, the other being French-Canadian), but the two filmmakers couldn't be more different otherwise. Morel got big in the late 2000s after helming Taken, a project that not only catapulted Liam Neeson to action movie stardom but also put this EuropaCorp veteran on the radar of all Hollywood studios. Well-known for his action films that emphasize dim lighting, “gritty” realism, and sloppy editing, Morel made sense to direct Dune from a cynical studio executive perspective (“Taken made money! Dune from the Taken guy will also make money!”) It was an incoherent choice from all other perspectives.

The Demise of This Original “Dune” Movie

By the end of 2010, things were already looking slippery for this new iteration of Dune once Morel was approached to direct a proposed blockbuster movie adaptation of Ouija. This filmmaker clearly wasn’t narrowing his focus solely on Arrakis. This made it no surprise that Paramount flat-out abandoned the project by March 2011, despite spending four years trying to make a modern-day Dune blockbuster work. At the time, it was revealed that Paramount's grip on the film rights to Dune had expired and that there was initially potential interest in taking pieces of this Dune movie to another studio movie. However, the prospects for a Dune resurrection were considered bleak even back in 2011.

In hindsight, the loss of those rights can be chalked up to Paramount going through an incredibly turbulent time at the dawn of the 2010s that would spell doom for the studio for much of the ensuing decade. Though Paramount loomed large over all other studios at the domestic box office in 2011, it had alienated many of the players behind its biggest hits. Paranormal Activity 3 producer Jason Blum had a movie deal at Universal Pictures. DreamWorks SKG had moved over to Disney/Touchstone Pictures. The Mouse House had also bought up Marvel Studios, which supplied two big hits for Paramount in 2011. If Paramount circa. 2011 couldn’t keep these massive titans on the studio lot, what hope did an oddball property like Dune have of sticking around at the label?

It also didn’t help that Dune was clearly a property Paramount first got attached to in 2007 because of the biggest hits of the early 2000s. Even as late as 2007, features trying to replicate the success of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings were common. Every studio wanted to reach into the past for a beloved series of books that could be translated into a lucrative saga of blockbusters. Paramount totally saw Dune as its key to getting in on the Lord of the Rings action. By March 2011, though, Hollywood’s priorities shifted to making Twilight knock-offs (And would morph once again a year later into producing pastiches of The Hunger Games). Dune no longer fit the mold of the default blockbusters Hollywood wanted to mimic, which likely made it easy for Paramount to say goodbye to the property.

It would take nearly six years after Paramount’s Dune movie fell apart for Legendary Pictures to secure the film rights to this text and pave the road for the Villeneuve’s version of the property. In the years in between, there was nary a whisper of other potential Dune reboots, with the density of this source material likely petrifying financiers from giving this property another chance on the big screen. All that waiting around turned out to be the right move given all the acclaim that’s greeted Villeneuve’s Dune. Plus, taking things slow and steady with this property saved the world from witnessing visions of Dune from the directors of Hancock and Taken!