Denis Villenueve has quietly positioned himself king of the modern wave of sci-fi movies with everything from Arrival to Blade Runner 2049, to Dune, the first half of his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s all-time classic science fiction novel about the various houses of a far, far future society fighting to control the planet Arrakis which houses Spice, the element necessary to interstellar flight. With recent casting news for Dune: Part Two, the latest to join Villeneuve’s second outing is Tim Blake Nelson.
The Hollywood Reporter gave the update on the casting news with the information coming later than the movie which already officially wrapped in December of 2022 to finish getting ready for its November 3, 2023 release date.
Tim Blake Nelson, the Coen brothers stalwart and villain from Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed is joining a cast that includes fellow recent announcements Florence Pugh (Little Women, Black Widow) and Austin Butler (Elvis), Léa Seydoux (The French Dispatch) and Christopher Walken (Batman Returns) in the second half of Villeneuve’s much-praised adaptation of the Frank Herbert classic of the same name. Dune opened October 22, 2021 and grossed over $400 million, garnering 10 Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture), winning six.
The 1965 novel was first adapted into a film by auteur David Lynch back in 1984, but failed to catch on due to a number of reasons including truncating a massively sprawling novel into the runtime of a single feature film and an audience that was hungry for science fiction in the Star Wars vein. Over the years various attempts were made including a miniseries on the Sci-Fi Channel (before it became SyFy) but it wasn’t until Denis Villeneuve stepped in that audiences got a proper take on the novel. Villeneuve co-wrote the film with Jon Spaihts, the first man to take a crack at Ridley Scott’s Prometheus.
Dune is a novel about the battle for the control of the planet Arrakis, a desert world with a tribe called the Fremen and a race of gigantic cosmic sandworms who produce a spice called mélange that’s the key to interstellar flight. House Harkonnen, a brutal dictatorship, is relieved of control of Arrakis by the emperor who installs House Atreides to oversee the planet. Baron Vladimir Harkonnen has Duke Leto Atreides assassinated and forces his son, Paul Atreides, and his mother, Jessica, a space-witch known as a Bene Gesserit, to flee where they end up joining the Fremen and fighting to reclaim the planet from the brutal Harkonnen regime.
Dune: Part Two releases November 3, 2023.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
