If the embed won’t play, the final trailer is also here on YouTube.
Good news for anyone who has already worked out the logistics of three hours in an IMAX seat with a large drink. Dune: Part Three is reported to run 151 minutes, which would make it the shortest film in Denis Villeneuve’s trilogy. The figure comes from an Irish Film Classification Office listing spotted by Dark Horizons, so treat it as very likely rather than carved in stone, as studios do occasionally tinker with credits and logos before release.
For comparison, 2021’s Dune ran 155 minutes and 2024’s Dune: Part Two stretched to 166. Back in September a rumour put Part Three at somewhere between 140 and 145 minutes, so the rumour mill was in the right desert but the wrong sietch. Two and a half hours remains a long sit by most people’s standards. By the standards of a franchise whose characters measure time in generations of selective breeding, it practically counts as a trailer.
There’s a good argument that a shorter film is the right one. Dune Messiah, which Part Three adapts, is the slimmest of Frank Herbert’s six Dune novels, a compact, chilly book about a hero discovering that winning the war was the easy part. It first appeared as a five-part serial in Galaxy magazine in 1969, and readers who had cheered Paul Atreides in the first novel were often baffled to find him presiding over a galactic jihad and feeling rather bad about it. That’s not a story that needs to sprawl. If anything, the danger with Messiah on screen was always that someone would pad it out with sandworm set pieces to make up the numbers.
Not that 151 minutes leaves room for idling. Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya lead a cast that now also includes Anya Taylor-Joy as Alia, Robert Pattinson as the shape-shifting Scytale and Jason Momoa back as the resurrected Hayt, alongside Florence Pugh, Rebecca Ferguson and Javier Bardem. That’s a lot of famous faces to get through, even with Hans Zimmer playing them in.
The film opens in UK cinemas and IMAX on 18 December, the same day as Avengers: Doomsday, a collision the internet has already christened Dunesday. Marvel’s film has the multiverse, the merchandise and reportedly the lead in advance sales. Villeneuve’s has a 151-minute runtime and a moral lesson about the dangers of charismatic leaders. At least one of them will let you out in time for the last bus.
Source: Dark Horizons.
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