Dune: The Sisterhood is getting a new creative staff behind it to bring it more in line with Denis Villenueve's 2021 take on the sprawling epic created by Frank Herbert in the mid-1960s.
Getting Dune to the big screen in another adaptation was as perilous as Paul Atreides putting his hand in the box of pain while the Reverend Mother held a poisonous Gom Jabbar to his neck. Now it looks like Dune: The Sisterhood is taking an even more death-defying journey, as it just lost its director and one of its stars in a big behind-the-scenes upheaval.
In a greater upheaval than finding out who will ultimately control Arrakis, Deadline reports that HBO has placed Dune: The Sisterhood on a hiatus as it retools the TV series spinoff, set some 10,000 years before the events of Dune, after a series of setbacks. Those setbacks include director Jonathan Renck (from their hit show Chernobyl) and co-lead star Shirley Henderson (best known to genre fans as Harry Potter's Moaning Myrtle) taking their exits from the project. On top of all that, the co-showrunner and writer of the pilot, Diane Ademu-John, has also walked, leaving the crew scrambling to get a new script in place alongside a cast that will be there through the long haul.
HBO was studied in what it had to say on the departures, claiming the halt is due to them trying to be true to the books. “As Dune: The Sisterhood has entered a pre-scheduled hiatus, some creative changes are being made to the production in an effort to create the best series possible and stay true to the source material,” said an HBO Max spokesperson. As such, Renck is off, and Henderson will no longer play Tula Harkonnen, a matriarch of House Harkonnen and a founding member of the Bene Gesserit order of witches. The scuttlebutt is that Renck's vision clashed with what Villeneuve had established in Dune.
With the studio saying a winter hiatus had always been planned and insiders on the Dune prequel series saying the studio is pushing the filming back by seven months to give everyone a chance to right the ship again, it’s anyone’s guess as to what will ultimately shake out of the production, if anything. One thing for sure is that the delays are messing with the actors’ schedules, and more may walk before shooting gets underway if the studio can’t offer a more enticing carrot for a series they previously agreed to the script and director on. It may take more than the magic of the Bene Gesserit to see Dune: The Sisterhood launch at all.
Dune: The Sisterhood is on production hiatus.
Source: Deadline
