Denis Villeneuve recently shared with Vanity Fair that ‘Dune: Messiah’ would be his last project as the director in the series. But he left the door open for possible sequels after the third installment, saying that someone else could step in to continue the story.
“Listen, if Dune: Messiah happens, it will have been many years for me on Arrakis, and I would love to do something else,” the director said. “I think that it would be a good idea for me to make sure that, in Messiah, there are the seeds in the project if someone wants to do something else afterwards, because they are beautiful books.”
“They are more difficult to adapt. They become more and more esoteric. It’s a bit more tricky to adapt, but I’m not closing the door. I will not do it myself, but it could happen with someone else,” he continued.
Warner Bros. has not yet given the green light for a third ‘Dune’ film. Still, Villeneuve confirmed in an earlier interview that he had already started working on the script.
Despite the source material for ‘Messiah’ being a direct sequel to Frank Herbert’s original novel, the director made it clear that his adaptation would not form a trilogy.
“It’s important that people understand that for me, it was really a diptych. It was really a pair of movies that will be the adaptation of the first book. That’s done and that’s finished,” he explained.
“If I do a third one, which is in the writing process, it’s not like a trilogy. It’s strange to say that, but if I go back there, it’s to do something that feels different and has its own identity.”
‘Dune: Part Two’ came out in March 2024 and covered the second half of Herbert’s first book. If a sequel arrives, it will follow Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya’s characters 12 years after the events of the first two films.
