Hot on the heels of the first trailer for his Blade Runner 2049 comes the news that Denis Villeneuve may be heading right back into another iconic sci-fi property. He's in talks with studio Legendary to direct their new version of Frank Herbert's epic space opera Dune.
Paramount were trying to get a new Dune off the ground for years, with names like Peter Berg and Pierre Morel attached before moving on again. Paramount's Dune rights lapsed in 2011, and Legendary were finally confirmed as the new kids on the Arrakis block last month. Their deal with the Frank Herbert estate allows the development of both movie ideas and TV shows based on the struggles of the Atreides family and the war for control of the desert planet Arrakis, home to both a valuable "Spice" that allows interstellar travel and deadly sandworms.
Dune is, of course, the novel that defeated both David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky. And that's just the first novel in a series of six. The Sci-Fi Channel went a bit further with a pair of mini-series a decade or so ago (green-screen CGI affairs that were fine at the time but dated horribly in about five minutes). But giving the dense, philosophical nature of Dune any sort of blockbuster franchise treatment is going to present a challenge...
Still, on the evidence of his previous work like Arrival, Incendies, Enemy and Sicario and what we've seen so far of Blade Runner 2049, if anyone's up to that challenge it's Villeneuve. Early days yet though, with no signatures on any dotted lines at this point. Watch this space.
Blade Runner 2049 is out in October, 2017.