Dune: Part Three’s new TV spot apologises in thirty seconds, and London has bought 33,000 tickets to hear the rest (trailer).

If the embed won’t play, the new TV spot is also here on YouTube.

Warner Bros. has released a fresh 30-second TV spot for Dune: Part Three, and if half a minute sounds a touch stingy for a film about a man who can see the entire future, think of it as an amuse-bouche. The campaign began with a teaser in March and a full trailer in July, and the final trailer is reportedly due any moment now, so this is the part of the evening where the waiter comes round with the bread.

The spot arrived alongside four new posters and the official tag line, “Forgive me for all I’ve done”, which is the sort of thing Paul Atreides really ought to have said before the holy war rather than seventeen years into it. The pick of the posters puts a robed figure on a throne high above a crowd in a vast golden hall, which sums up the mood rather well: absolute power, superb interior design, dreadful long-term prospects.

The more interesting news is coming from the box office before a single frame has been projected. Tickets went on sale this week, and the BFI IMAX in London, the biggest screen in Britain, reportedly sold around 33,000 advance seats for Dune: Part Three within 24 hours, a record for the venue. That is an awful lot of people volunteering to spend the week before Christmas on a desert planet with no water and a messiah complex, although it is still a more restful option than Oxford Street.

Denis Villeneuve directs from a script he wrote with Brian K. Vaughan, adapting Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah. Timothée Chalamet’s Paul is now a ruthless emperor haunted by visions of collapse, Zendaya’s Chani sits at the heart of a conspiracy against his throne, and Jason Momoa returns as Duncan Idaho, a man who died in the first film and has been brought back for the third, which is about as Herbert as plotting gets. Florence Pugh, Rebecca Ferguson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Javier Bardem, Charlotte Rampling and Isaach de Bankolé fill out the court, with Robert Pattinson joining as the shape-shifting Face Dancer Scytale. Linus Sandgren takes over the camera from Greig Fraser, and Hans Zimmer is back on throat-singing and existential dread.

Then there’s the scheduling. Dune: Part Three opens internationally from 16 December and in North America on 18 December, the same day as Avengers: Doomsday, a collision the internet has inevitably christened Dunesday. Think Barbenheimer with more sand and less pink, and with tracking that reportedly favours Marvel by some distance. We covered the earlier trailers here at SFcrowsnest when they landed. This one is much shorter, but then the Fremen never did believe in wasting anything.