Like millions of other people, I’ve been eagerly anticipating Dune: Part Three, which is going to hit the 2026 movie schedule on December 18. The book-to-screen adaptation will serve as the third and final installment of director Denis Villeneuve’s trilogy that started way back during COVID, if you can believe it. The movie stars Timothèe Chalamet, of course, as Paul Atreides, just like the first two movies, and recently, Chalamet and his castmates sat down for an interview. He was asked about the ending of the movie, and his answer has me even more excited.
As with any source material as beloved as the Dune series of books, fans are usually nervous about an adaptation sticking the landing, and that’s certainly true of Dune: Part Three. Fans of the series know how the book ends, but will the movie change it? Improve on it? Screw it up? Chalamet was asked by one of his co-stars, Jason Momoa, in an interview with the cast in The New York Times about the ending, and Chalamet’s answer is ambiguous, but definite:
Absolutely. It didn’t feel like the bar dropped at all, Denis just changed the location of the bar. This movie is its own thing.
Now, calling the movie “its own thing” might make some book fans nervous, but that comes as a response from something another co-star, Robert Pattinson. It brings a little more context to what Chalamet said. Pattinson said:
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The script was really cool, but it was quite complicated. And watching the film, it’s not about what I thought it was going to be about at all. It reads as much more of a grand political, moral fable, and the movie is so much more emotional.
This all stemmed from a question from The Times asking if the movie departs from the source material, the second book in the series, Dune Messiah. As a fan of the books (although I admittedly haven’t read Messiah in quite a few years), I welcome changes. I don’t want to stray too far, of course, but books and movies are very different mediums, and changes need to be made. The important thing is that the message of the book is translated to the big screen, and it sounds like, at least according to Chalamet, that Villeneuve’s done that.
Pattison calling it a political fable is exactly what I want, as that was ultimately the purpose of the author, Frank Herbert. The Dune series isn’t just a sci-fi story set far into the future, it’s meant to be a morality tale for us, here on Earth today (even if Messiah is almost 60 years old now). Ultimately, any concerns I had were put to rest as I was reading the interview when yet another A-list co-star, Anya Taylor-Joy, reminded us who is in charge here:
Denis is literally the biggest Dune fan of all time, so for that to be the person who’s steering the ship, you feel pretty good about it.
Feel good, I do. I think this is going to be epic in every way. In the meantime, now is a good time to fire up your HBO Max subscription to watch the first two Dune movies.