Dune Part Three brings the holy war home, and Arrakis still isn’t offering package holidays (trailer).
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three is now looming over the horizon like another sandstorm with a grudge, and the newly released trailer suggests that the director has no intention of ending his desert opera with a polite handshake and a cup of spice tea. The film is set for release on 18th December 2026, and Warner Bros. is selling it as the epic conclusion to Villeneuve’s trilogy, with the story drawing from Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah rather than trying to stretch the first novel like old chewing gum. The trailer also confirms a sizeable time jump, with Paul’s empire older, grimmer and even less emotionally healthy than before.
That, to be fair, is exactly as it should be. Anyone who came away from Dune: Part Two thinking Paul Atreides had completed a heroic self-help journey may have been distracted by the sandworms. Herbert’s whole point, and Villeneuve seems to understand this perfectly, is that messiahs are dangerous things to leave lying around. The first two films gave us the rise. Part Three looks ready to give us the bill. The trailer leans hard into the consequences of power, showing Paul not as a clean-cut saviour but as a haunted emperor trapped inside the machine he helped build, with Chani’s heartbreak and the coming holy war hanging over everything like a funeral banner.
Timothée Chalamet returns as Paul, with Zendaya back as Chani, Florence Pugh as Irulan, Rebecca Ferguson as Jessica, Javier Bardem as Stilgar, Josh Brolin as Gurney and, rather deliciously, Jason Momoa returning in the form of Hayt, because in Dune, even death sometimes gets a studio note and comes back for another go. The really juicy addition, though, is Robert Pattinson as Scytale, one of Herbert’s more slippery and unsettling villains, and the trailer gives him precisely the kind of unnerving presence one wants from a shape-shifting schemer in a collapsing empire. Anya Taylor-Joy also appears to be stepping properly into Alia territory at last, which should add an extra dollop of elegant nightmare fuel to proceedings.
Visually, it still looks absurdly handsome in that severe Villeneuve manner where everyone appears to be suffering beautifully inside the world’s most expensive cathedral. Reports around the trailer launch say the film was shot primarily on 65mm, with select IMAX sequences and digital work for the harshest desert material, which sounds about right for a franchise that wants every grain of sand to feel like it has an agent and its own lighting plan. Hans Zimmer is back as well, which means audiences can once again expect music that sounds like the universe itself has developed indigestion.
What is most encouraging is that the trailer does not look like a lazy victory lap. It looks stranger, colder and more dangerous than the previous film. Villeneuve has apparently shifted the timeline from the novel’s original gap to a 17-year leap from Part Two, which gives the story room to let its wounds fester properly. That matters, because Dune Messiah has always been the awkward, clever little blade hidden behind the grandeur of Dune itself. It is the book that turns round and says, “You did realise this was a warning, yes?” If Villeneuve gets that tone right, this may end up being the most interesting film in the trilogy rather than merely the biggest.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we do have a weakness for science fiction that remembers empire is usually just barbarism in fancier robes. Dune: Part Three looks as though it intends to finish Paul Atreides’ story not with a triumphant fanfare, but with the sound of destiny grinding its own teeth to dust. Which, frankly, feels much more Herbert. Bring on the trailer, the intrigue, the prophecy, the knife fights and the inevitable outbreak of fans insisting they have always understood the Butlerian Jihad perfectly well, actually.
Arrakis remains hell with better branding. And that, in its way, is part of the charm.
