We saw the first several minutes of the film as well as a key first-act action sequence, and the footage played as narratively obtuse as the infamous source material. (which distributed Blade Runner 2049 in North America while Sony released it overseas) is trying to not bet the proverbial farm on “Hey, it’s a Dune movie!” The first trailer, released with Tenet last August, emphasized sweeping visuals, the ensemble cast and the notion that Chalamet’s Paul Atreides would be a protagonist/marquee character worth following.īut in terms of the footage we saw, it’s the very definition of “good news, bad news.” Even with IMAX-formatted footage, much of what we saw consisted of almost oppressively tight close-ups amid periodic expansive wide shots. The good news is that Dune has a huge ensemble cast (including Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista and many more), a PG-13 and the promise of more action than Blade Runner 2049. That actually would have been pretty good for an R-rated, 2.5-hour, action-lite, sci-fi tone poem that didn’t cost $160 million.

So, even with rave reviews, Blade Runner 2049 earned $93 million domestic and $251 million worldwide. Harrison Ford hasn’t been a draw outside of Star Wars and Indiana Jones since What Lies Beneath in 2000, and Ryan Gosling has rarely been an opener. Alas, Alcon Entertainment, Columbia Pictures and friends spent Tron: Legacy-level money on a far-less audience-friendly three-decades-later sequel to a 1982 box office bomb and focused the entirety of the advertising campaign on the mere idea that it was another Blade Runner movie. A cult classic to be sure, but one more revered by we film geeks than general audiences and not one passed down from parent to child like Star Wars or the Disney animated films. We were here four years ago, with a Denis Villeneuve-directed sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, a film that bombed in 1982 and eventually became one of the more influential sci-fi films of the 1980’s. Even with the budget, the cast, the source material and Film Twitter treating it like the second coming, Dune is absolutely an underdog. Don’t laugh, the Hotel Transylvania trilogy has thus far earned $1.3 billion worldwide. The reason for the move was simple: getting away from both No Time to Die (opening in the UK in late September and in North America on October 8) and getting away from Hotel Transylvania: Transformania which Sony moved from July 23 to October 1. Legendary’s over/under $160 million, star-studded Dune part one of two (yes, it’s only adapting half of Frank Herbert’s influential tome) will open not on October 1 (the same weekend where Blade Runner 2049 bombed but also where Gravity, Annabelle, Gone Girl, The Martian and Joker broke out) but on October 22.

You dont know js, dune, foundation