Ahead of its October 22 debut, Warner Bros. is giving us another look at Dune through a series of close-up character posters depicting the film’s primary characters.
Warner Bros. revealed the new posters through the official Dune Twitter account in a threaded series of tweets. The posters shown off in the thread include: Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), Lady Jessica Atreides (Rebecca Ferguson), Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), Chani (Zendaya), Stilgar (Javier Bardem), and Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård).
The thread is a remind of just how flush with award-winning stars the cast of Dune is.
Dune has been adapted from Frank Herbert’s original novel a few times, but always considered deeply flawed. The first attempt came from director Alejandro Jodorowsky, and is infamous for its attempted scale and wild departure from the novels, eventually becoming the subject of a 2013 documentary. The first version to make it to market was David Lynch’s Dune. Lynch’s vision is admired for its unique visual design and casting but has been heavily criticized for its own departures from the source material. SyFy adapted it to a mini-series in 2000, which more closely followed the story but which featured basic cable TV-grade visual effects.
Villeneuve’s Dune has fans of the novels excited not just because of the talented cast, but because of Villeneuve’s track record directing hard science fiction films like Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, too. Interestingly, this film only adapts the first half of Frank Herbert’s original novel, something which has fans excited and concerned in equal measure. On the one hand, a two-part Dune film has a chance of doing justice to the complex source material. On the other, the second part hasn’t been announced yet and there’s no indication that the studio is filming them back-to-back like we’ve seen with big-scale fantasy stories in the past like the Lord of the Rings films and some of the Harry Potter movies.
After a handful of delays, Dune releases to theaters on October 22, 2021. In the meantime, check out all the details you may have missed in that first trailer, how the first Dune’s Paul, Kyle MacLachlan, feels about Dune hitting HBO Max, and where you can find the newest trailer.
