“Dunesday” will be the big event in cinema this holiday season, with Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three both hitting theaters on December 18th. Everything will be in play when these two major blockbusters go at it; which film ends up getting the bigger box office wins could come down to the smallest of factors, including rating and runtime. That latter part could be the most important, as Doomsday and Dune 3 both need significant turnaround of theatrical showings to generate the kind of billion-dollar box offices that both feilms are hoping for.
Now we have the length of one of the movies: Dune: Part Three‘s official runtime has been revealed, and it is already causing a stir online, as fans debate whether or not there is enough movie to tell this final chapter of the Dune trilogy properly.
Dune: Part Three has been listed with a runtime of 2 hours and 30 minutes at locations like AMC Theaters. That’s pretty much the standard length of a major franchise blockbuster these days, but it’s also the shortest runtime for a Dune movie yet. The first Dune (2021) had a runtime of 2 hours and 35 minutes; Dune: Part Two had a runtime of 2 hours and 45 minutes.
So what’s there to debate or crticize here? It seems pretty clear that Villeneuve’s Dune movies all fall within the same basic range of runtime; what seems to be tripping some fans up is that Dune: Part Three is the shortest film when it is arguably attempting to adapt a bigger chunk of the source material. Dune and Dune: Part Two were a two-film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s original Dune novel (1965); Part Three is an adaptation of of Herbert’s second novel, Dune Messiah (1969), which ended the arc of Paul Atreides.
As always, however, the devil is in the details: for the record, the Dune novel is nearly 900 pages long in paperback; conversely, Dune Messiah is by far the shortest book in the entire series, at just 256 pages (every other novel in the series is at least 400 pages). When you factor in that math, it looks more like Denis Villeneuve has successfully adapted the entire Dune Messiah novel into a complete blockbuster film experience. After tackling the first book over two massive films, it won’t be all that shocking to see Villeneuve and his co-screenwriter Brian K. Vaughn (Y: The Last Man, Runaways) handle this third adaptaion with far more precision and focus.
In Dune: Part Three, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) has spent nearly 20 years leading the Fremen of Arrakis in a cosmic jihad. As the ruthless emperor of the Imperium, Paul has drifted away from all those closest to him, including his true love, the Fremen warrior Chani (Zendaya). With Paul possessing god-like awareness of the present, past and future, striking him down is nearly impossible. However, forces within the Imperium (Paul’s “wife” Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh); guilds like the Bene Gesserit witches and the bioengineers of the Bene Tleilaxu, like Scytale (Robert Pattinson), conspire to assassinate Paul and reclaim power. But Paul and his family are still strong, and the plot unravels just as fast as the conspirators can set it into motion.
Dune: Part Three will be released in theaters on December 18th.
