Denis Villeneuve Confirms Dune 3 Will Be His Last Movie In The Franchise

Steady your sandworms and sound the space bagpipes — Dune news coming through! It's been an interesting few months for fans of the DCU (that's the Dune Cinematic Universe), with confirmation coming back in April that a Dune Part Three is officially in the works at Legendary, and then further reports in June placing an 'Untitled Event Film' from director Denis Villeneuve in Warner Bros.' slate for December 2026. Now, in an interview with Vanity Fair for their "Little Gold Men" podcast, Villeneuve has confirmed that Dune: Messiah is currently being written — and, more importantly, the Quebecois filmmaker's third trip to Arrakis will also be his last.

When asked about his progress on a follow-up to Dune: Part Two, Villeneuve — who says he sees Dune: Messiah as its own thing and his first two Frank Herbert adaptations as a self-contained diptych ("It's not like a trilogy") — revealed his desire to exit the franchise whilst leaving the door open for other filmmakers. "Listen, if Dune: Messiah happens, it will have been many years for me on Arrakis, and I would love to do something else," said Villeneuve. "I think that it would be a good idea for me to make sure that, in Messiah, there are the seeds in the project if someone wants to do something else afterwards, because they are beautiful books. They are more difficult to adapt. They become more and more esoteric." For anyone who has read Herbert's further Dune novels post-Messiah, esoteric may be the understatement of the century. (And for anyone who hasn't, please do Google them!)

But whilst Villeneuve and the spice may be set to flow in different directions in the near future, the ever-busy filmmaker — who elsewhere tells Vanity Fair he "know[s] how to do" Messiah's significant 12-year time jump — isn't heading off on his jollies anytime soon. At the same time a third Dune was announced, we also learned that Villeneuve's gearing up to tackle Annie Jacobsen's speculative non-fiction book Nuclear War: A Scenario. And on the "Little Gold Men" podcast, Villeneuve name-checked both his long-gestating Arthur C. Clarke adaptation Rendezvous With Rama ("that screenplay is slowly moving forward"), and confirmed he's still working on his even-longer-gestating Cleopatra movie too. When we'll actually see any of these films is anybody's guess for now, but until we hear more, we'll just have to move with the flow of the process. We must join it. We must flow with it...