Dune: Part Two wraps shooting

Principle photography on Dune: Part Two has wrapped, according to star Timothée Chalamet.

The film started shooting back in July, with Denis Villeneuve returning to direct and stars of the first movie Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Charlotte Rampling and Stephen McKinley Henderson all returning. They will be joined by newcomers Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, Christopher Walken as Emperor Shaddam IV, Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan, Souheila Yacoub as Shishakli and Léa Seydoux as Lady Margot Henring.

The film will be based on the second half of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune, as the full book was deemed too long to adapt into a single film. A prior attempt, by David Lynch in 1984, had to rush the story to fit everything into a single film, although a 2000 mini-series for SyFy managed to adapt the entire story over five hours but with a very low budget that sold the epic scale of the story short.

Villeneuve has expressed an interest in returning to direct a third film, based on the second Dune novel, Dune Messiah (of six in total), but this will depend on the financial performance of the second film. The first movie did reasonably given the COVID pandemic, but was a much greater success on home media and streaming than it was in the cinema.

Dune: Part Two is currently scheduled to hit cinemas on 3 November 2023.