Via the good people at io9, my attention was drawn this morning to news that Dune is coming back to the silver screen. This is probably old news to many of you; we've known for a while that the man at the helm is Denis Villeneuve, fresh off Blade Runner 2049 (a worthy sequel to most everyone's favorite futuristic film noir), and just this week Deadline pegged a certain young Hollywood heartthrob for Atreides.
The latest news, however, is that Brian Herbert—son of Dune author Frank Herbert and an author in his own right—revealed that the first script will only focus on the first half of the novel. This confirms an earlier report that Villeneuve plans to adapt the book across two movies.
Herbert's epic sci-fi novel is set far off in the future—about 20,000 years from now—and it tells the story of an intergalactic power struggle between different noble houses to control a substance called melange, which makes interstellar travel possible. (That's massively underselling things, but you try summarizing a 400-page novel in one sentence.) Published in 1965, it has gone on to have a huge influence in popular culture; here at Ars, our favorite descendants are Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" and the frequent references to the litany of fear by Peter Puppy in the Earthworm Jim cartoons. (The recreation of Dune using gummy worms gets a notable mention.)
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