68
votes
‘Dune: Part Two’: How sci-fi space worm epic reared head to $81.5m opening after strike release delay
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- 'Dune: Part Two' Heading To Opening Around $76M, Lands 'A' CinemaScore - Saturday Box Office Update
- Authors
- Anthony D'Alessandro
- Published
- Mar 2 2024
- Word count
- 1894 words
I saw it on the first night. While I haven't read the book, its influence is monumental, and I really can't help but think that the Dune movies are the first Lord of the Rings level adaptation since LOTR. (It's also another book I attempted to read at a very young age but wasn't quite ready for. I revisited Tolkien a few years later, but I have been remiss in not doing so with Dune...)
Hollywood is typically abysmal at fantasy and sci-fi adaptations, with only a select few films that are a meticulous, faithful adaptation of a beloved book led by a director passionate about the source material. I see a lot of the LOTR situation in Dune. Having watched the LOTR films as they came out, I even hear the same sort of commentary.
Been thinking/talking about this a lot with friends after watching Dune and the Netflix Avatar in the same week.
I think Dune and LOTR are "good films that are adaptations", as opposed to "good adaptations". And I vastly prefer them because of that.
LOTR is famously missing Bombadil and shortens or removes other aspects, and there's plenty of other examples like Helms Deep where the movies (even the theatrical versions) expand on things that were a couple pages at best in the books. The LOTR films work because they're taking the differing mediums into account and bringing the story to the new medium by playing to the medium's strengths. It's similar to why there are so many Shakespear/Robin Hood/etc adaptations on stage and screen. The particular "creator" bringing the aspects of the story they want to the foreground and adding their own twist to the story overall.
Dune does a lot of the same things, like having the emperor's daughter "on screen" before the last scene of the book, or not having Paul's sister physically "show up" like in prior adaptations. Aila not being born yet and getting what are pre-chapter/section asides in the book as actual scenes in the movie work better for the movie overall. Even though it makes them "less faithful" adaptations.
There's a lot to be said about caring about the source material as well, as Shyamalan's Avatar and tons of others show. But I really feel like that's a trap that people tend to fall into.
If it's a bad adaptation, but a good piece of media on it's own, that's better overall for the franchise. The Witcher is another example that comes to mind, where the games mostly ignored the books except for setting and character background, and were celebrated so much that more books were written, shows were created, and the books were officially translated into English for the first time.
I haven't read Dune, but I have read LoTR and the Silmarillion and a bunch of more obscure Tolkien lore stuff. And I honestly can't say I can imagine a substantially better adaptation. Yeah, sure, there are some things you might want to change, but they would all come with tradeoffs. LoTR the movies are about as faithful to the books as you can imagine any big-budget movies to ever be. You might have issues with the Hobbit movies or the Amazon tv show, but as far as the original movies go, I don't think it can get much better.
We have to accept, at the outset, that any adaptation will change things. There is no such thing as a perfect adaptation to a different medium. Different media have different strengths and weaknesses. They will emphasize different things.
Exactly.
It feels like they usually run into problems when they 'just' try to adapt things, instead of making a movie they care about that happens to be an adaptation.
The Netflix live action Cowboy Bebop is a less popular example that comes to mind. I thought it was neat that they played with the timeline and gave different versions of the same characters. It's a shame it received such instant backlash that the second season was cancelled within hours of the first being released. If I want to watch the original again, I can.
In the same way that I can watch the Disney animal Robin Hood or the Kevin Costner Robin Hood, or the Men in Tights Robin Hood, I think it would be neat to have different flavors of the same stories for newer things. Copyright is a lot of what makes that difficult, but I think the popular insistence that there is a "perfect adaptation" that creators can only approach, but never achieve, gets in the way too.
The writers of the Expanse are executive producers on the show. As far as they are concerned, the show is a different telling of the same story as the books. I rather like how it turned out. There are some things I like better about each version, but they're both good in their own right.
I think it's just hard, in general, for fans of any book to see things they liked from a book left out of an adaptation. Though there are also plenty of people who seem to object to any changes merely on principle. Those people will not ever be satisfied with any adaptation and would honestly be happier if they just avoided adaptations of anything they like.
I loved the live-action Bebop. It was far more accessible than the anime, and was dripping with worldbuilding greatness.
Fandoms obsessed with accuracy are why we can't have nice things.
See also the backlash for black April in TMNT.
What comes to mind is that there are basically two types of adaptation:
Prioritize accurately recreating the source as closely as possible.
Prioritize making a quality end product keeping with the overarching theme and plot, and be willing to deviate from the source material when needed to make that happen.
The letter of the law vs the spirit of the law if you will. And when transitioning to the screen, adaptations that follow the latter are almost universally better.
I think you missed a couple:
3. Prioritize winning an Oscar at the expense of telling a story to the point the story loses cohesion and only loosely resembles the source material.
4. Prioritize flashy action at the expense of everything else. Source material sets the theme and little else.
I can live with 1 & 2, but 3 & 4 drive me insane and they're not limited to adaptations. They feel like a cancer in movies, right alongside being so PC that it stunts creativity.
I'm VERY confused as to how so many directors make it big without any creativity. How do you get a budget of 200+ million and produce something that looks like a college theater student's film project? They sometimes get big numbers at first, but few watch them twice. LOTR told a story well, even if it it deviated from the original, and that's why people still watch it. Those with no story or poorly done stories just sort of fade into oblivion.
So to me it's less about adaptation, more about what makes a better story. Often those who wrote the books were better at writing stories and so getting closer to the book often results in a better story. Though that's not always the case, so it's really up to the director to decide which is better to go with. Deviate because it works better for movies or stick to the story because it carries over well.
Edit: No offense to college student films, many of them are actually really good.
As a long time fan of the book series, I couldn’t agree more. This was one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long long time and I agree with the LOTR comparison.
In some ways I even think the storytelling is as good or better than the book, part 1&2 are more direct to the main story and part 2 especially invokes a lot of raw emotion that didn’t come across as well in the book imo
If you can, there is an audiobook version that has a full cast of narrators for the characters in it that is really good. And it was the only way that I had managed to read through it, after starting it like different times.
Ohhh I might have to get that. Part 2 is so good and now I feel invested in this world. I want to try the books, but not sure if I should wait for the next film. I know the director is already working at adapting it
The director said he already was working on the script and stuff, but was going to be taking a break before making the next Dune film, maybe make a different movie in between part 2 and Dune Messiah. It'll probably be a 4-6 year wait then, so I recommend reading the books in the meantime.
LoTR films were not really good adaptations. Good compared to most adaptations...but not actually good adaptations IMO.
If anything the first Dune movie seemed like a better adaptation (haven't seen the second). At least it felt like it got the atmoshpere right...Legolas shield skiing, not so much. The LoTR movies felt a little bit too arcadey I think in comparison.
Fellowship is an excellent adaptation, mostly because it avoids the arcadeyness. Return and Two Towers are good, but remind me a bit of the third Star Wars original trilogy movie when they get silly.
I rewatched them this last summer side by side with the Nolan Batman films and I was really surprised by the parallel structure: a strong initial film achieves damn near perfection. The sequel ups the action ante with the same characters, benefiting from the initial film's character and environment setup but slopping on an extra heap of action to draw in bandwagoners and fans who just want action. And the third film wraps up the complete story despite getting bogged down in even more action (seriously, I forgot how long the gratuitious action scenes can be -- the Paths of the Dead bone collapse action sequence takes ages! And every time Batman fights Bane it's a 3-5 minute deluge of punches and groans.)
I dunno if it's an age thing, but I can barely stand most action movies anymore. There are only so many ways to hit a person 😅.
Having said that, The Brothers Sun, and Warrior I binged watched in a few days/week each. Verrrry good action sequences.
It's funny because, as someone who read the books, I absolutely hated the first part, but I'll definitely give part two a try!
Part 2 is definitely a lot better IMO, as somebody else who read the books.
I felt like a lot of the characters in the first movie were compromised for the sake of making the movie more accessible, but the second movie remedied that for most of them
With a relatively small budget of 190M (for comparison The Flash cost 220M to produce) this will easily be profitable theatrically for WB, who is shaping up to have a great year overall. And who just came off a big success with Wonka (meaning Timothee Chalamet is leading two of the biggest films since last summer).
That 190M budget is wild considering it looks the way it does. Other film budgets:
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania - 275M
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - 300M
The Marvels - 270M
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom - 215M
Yet it looks substantially more expensive.
Those budget comparisons really make Dune that much more impressive. How does the movie look so good despite a lower (relatively speaking) budget to other big titles?
Better use of practical effects most likely, but still even the sandworm riding just looked good
Part of the problem with a lot of modern blockbusters is that they don't plan out the shots and there's a "fix it in post" mentality. Many of these films also begin production without a locked script. So you get a lot of last minute changes that result in CGI that doesn't look great.
Another problem is many of the directors for these films aren't experienced with VFX (Nia DaCosta was thrown into The Marvels without much experience in CGI) and they make decisions that often don't go well.
The difference here is Dune went in with a specific plan, a locked script, and a Director that became familiar with CGI spectacle as he made the jump to Dune from Arrival and Blade Runner 2049.
Considering the "savings", of ~$100m, it's pretty crazy that any project in fact gets green lit without those pre-requisits, most notably a locked script. It's pretty wild that the "cheap" parts of a mega size project gets skipped and filmed with a "we're doing it live" + "work our Post people to an early grave" attitude
Everything Everywhere All At Once cost $15-25m and looks way better than, say, Quantumania simply because of the overall cohesiveness of set design
I will never get over J.J. Abrams saying, "Maybe we should have planned it out beforehand" about the new Star Wars trilogy in an interview after the third one came out.
I don't understand how someone can be given command of the budget of a small country and decide to "just wing it".
Especially with something as big as Star Wars and Marvel are. Like I would expect them to have some sort of a plan in place, but no, with Star Wars, it was a complete mess, especially after the second movie. Marvel does have some sort of plan in place, but that is the number of movies that they are planning on making.
Kathleen Kennedy had a similar numbers plan for Star Wars. A non-flagship movie, multiple series, and a flagship movie per year ad infinitum.
Goes to show that it's not just about having the plan, it's about having stories to tell in the first place. 90% of that plan was dismantled after Rise.
The fact that they didn't even seem to have nailed down the broad strokes of the story they were going to be telling is just appalling. Yeah, not every writer is going to meticulously outline and plot everything out. Some people write by the seat of their pants, and that can be fine. But for Christ's sake, with a franchise that big, you should at least have some idea of where you are going and what you are doing.
Though to some extent, I think I see where they were coming from with what they ended up doing. Empire Strikes Back is considered incredible despite the fact that its story was made up after the original was released. On top of that, it had a separate director to boot. And then, more recently, the MCU had a lot of individual writers/directors and was planning to offer creative freedom to different writers/directors for each of the new movies.
It was only after the Last Jedi blew up in their face (and Colin Trevorrow shit the bed) that Lucasfilm decided to fall back on what they thought made The Force Awakens so much more successful and less divisive. Namely, and rather inaccurately, having JJ Abrams in charge.
Personally, I think Abrams has shown he's a pretty good director, particularly in terms of having good visuals and getting good performances from his actors. But do not let him near the script! (Though I would imagine he wouldn't accept directing if he wasn't allowed to muck around with the script.)
We see these numbers and think people using it must be super focused and geniuses and in the end they are all faking like the rest of us.
The world is ruled by morons
Coincidentally I was watching The Marvels last night and I was rather floored at how many scenes were made with really poor CGI.
In his last video, Patrick Willems stated that (in comparison to puppets), CG is in some ways like cartoons for adults. I think that if the production crew thought of it that way and produced it as if it were an animated film to begin with they might have been put together better.
My condolences.
Marvels also went through some extensive reshoots which absolutely didn't help. But test screenings for it were going poorly so they sunk more money into it, and did a heavy re-edit of the film (most likely without DaCosta around although she's denied it). So that was a messy post-production process to try to salvage an unsalvagable film.
I think the sand must be easier to render and far easier to model in 3D. They probably have either off-the-shelf software to generate sand or pay for in-house software engineers.
And then a lot of the other scenes are more intimate. You just need a properly lit tent or a stone wall.
Recently rewatched The Mummy. Astonishing how good the CGI sand looks in places despite being a couple of decades old. Of course, they also rely immensely on practical effects, reminding me that we can all tolerate CGI in small doses. It's when EVERYTHING is CGI that the immersion truly breaks in a Star Wars prequel moment.
It's not so much the amount of CGI as it is the filmmakers knowing how to work within the limits of CGI and play to it's strengths.
The reason Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest still looks so good is because he was carefully designed to avoid common CGI problems, and the scenes he shows up in were also written with those limitations in mind.
The tentacle beard is one of the smartest elements of his design. Because Davy Jones is essentially not human from the nose down, any defects in how he is animated from the face down go largely unnoticed by the viewers whose brains are not accustomed to looking at a talking octopus. This let the animators put much more attention into his eyes and brow to get them just right.
Giving him wet mollusk skin, and setting him in dark or harshly lit scenes was another smart trick, as it lets them do away with all the complexities that come with animating human skin in brighter or softer lighting conditions.
Which is funny considering how absolutely atrocious the Scorpion King CGI was.
That's in the second one though.
Don't remind me! Even Returns ruined most of the movie with CGI. The OG is pretty solid except for a few CGI mummies towards the end, which stand out as a bit of a shame because the non-CGI mummies at the end look great. And, well... they're mummies. All you have to do is wrap somebody in dirty rags! Stop complicating things with excessive CGI.
Pre-production is a big part of it. That is where you figure out what your movie is going to look like and how you will film your special effects.
Tron: Legacy is a good example of a movie that benefited from an extensive pre-production process that went as far as to produce a three minute short film demonstrating their production design and visual effects.
By the time principal photography began on Tron: Legacy, all the visual effects and production design requirements were figured out, and the result is a very visually distinct and technically impressive movie made for little more than half the budget of Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End.
They also had Barbie last year, which is their highest grossing film ever.
Between these hits and Zaslav's aggressive cost-cutting, they may actually be able to start shedding some of that obnoxious debt AT&T left them with. They may even have a bright future ahead of them, if they can keep the quality up after the aforementioned cost-cutting.
Really goes to show how far a 200 million dollar budget can go when its not being squandered. Its obvious that there's a LOT of bloat and waste. How the Marvels cost 270m is anyone's guess.
The film went through extensive reshoots
I watched the first film last weekend, and saw part 2 today, these movies are amazing. I will say the IMAX volume was not something I was ready for, I had to leave and get some ibuprofen half way through.
Thanks for the heads-up. I'll bring ear plugs and or headphones. Any nausea?
I don't get any motion sickness but I could see some scenes being a trigger for that. Enjoy!
I saw Part 2 today and really enjoyed it. My wife really enjoyed the first one but hated Part 2. I think the pacing was a little off, but I was still entertained and no one could beat Villeneuve when it comes to a visual feast.
A commenter higher up compared it to LotR and I understand wanting to make that comparison but I still think the LotR movies were superior. Regardless, I was entertained and it got me out to the theatre which is getting exceedingly rare for me these days.
I liked part 2, but its a "good" movie. Part 1 is a great movie and possibly one of the best sci fi I've seen.
Agreed 100%. I liked part 2 and will see it twice. But part 1 just had this severity and pitch-perfect pacing that fits the world so well. 2 is a much more conventional film.
I also missed the grand-scale shots from the first film (spaceships rising out of the ocean; tiny spaceships emerging from the space gate – shortly revealed to be absolutely massive spaceships).
2 was good though; the two new main characters that we hadn't seen before were both great as well.
Yeah I would agree with that. I think a 4 hour movie would have been the most ideal, not that that would ever happen these days. I was still entertained but the first movie definitely had better pacing.
I really hope this movie does well so Villeneuve is allowed to take a crack at Dune Messiah.
As I understand it, that is as far as he has said he is interested in taking adapting Dune. And it is also my understanding that Frank Herbert originally wanted to include Messiah as part of the first book but wasn't able to.
I saw Dune 2 this weekend at my favorite local, independent theater. I am a sci-fi reader though I haven't read the books (though I have tried 3-4 times.) And I've seen the first film 7-8 times (it's easily slotted in as my go-to while on flights or otherwise uncontrollable down time.)
This second installment delivered on the foundation laid by the first and exceeded my expectations. There are aspects that could be nitpicked. I thought of the movie pitch youtube videos a couple times, some really big challenges are "super easy, barely an inconvenience." But honestly it didn't detract from the film because the focus didn't need to be helm's deep style battles, or furiosa driving through the dust storm type action. The film delivered in showing the plot beats that actually impact what is unfolding on scene.
And the big reason I love Villeneuve's catalog is the cinematography. With Hans Zimmer's score it feels like a brutal alien universe befitting a heavy metal album.
Dune 2 was visually stunning movie. I really love how villeneuve told the story through visual, lightning, movement, and acting. That you can convey a lot with visuals, pictures really to say more than 1000 words. The dialogue serves contextual clarity to the narrative. There are some part of the books that I would have liked to see on screen, but at the same time I really respect his adaptation and changes. For me, that's a hallmark of a wonderful adaptation, where the changes comes from a place of love and respect to both the source material and to the medium.
I've read Dune a handful of times, and watched all the adapations (except for this latest movie) multiple times.
You're not wrong. Dune is very frontloaded with exposition and "tell, don't show" style writing. It's a lot of setup before the actual plot starts, and a lot of it feels fast-forwarded through in the book especially. It's not the most enjoyable read and probably a major part of why it was considered cursed to adapt for the longest time.
I enjoyed the first movie a lot for similar reasons that I enjoy 2001: A Space Odyssey's more "quiet and boring" moments after I read the book and realized there were lore-building and subtle indications put into those moments.
I haven't seen Part 2 yet but, based on the reception its getting, it seems like Villeneuve has done a good job of actually getting the quality parts of Dune's story hooks out effectively.