Denis Villeneuve has now made two “Dune” films that talk constantly about the Spacing Guild and never once show you what is inside one. Two movies of characters lowering their voices about the navigators who fold space, and two movies of the camera politely looking somewhere else. That ended on Tuesday, in of all places a thirty-three-second ticket advert, and the BR team has watched it enough times to be slightly embarrassed about it. The tank is real, it floats, and there is something moving behind the glass.
Warner Bros. dropped the teaser on August 18 with the least romantic title imaginable, “Dune Insider Screenings | Tickets on Sale,” because that is exactly what it is. This is not the trailer. The proper one landed in July and ran nearly three minutes. This is a thirty-three-second promo built to move IMAX seats, and it is doing that job with footage most people have not seen. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Dune: Part Three” and for the events of Frank Herbert’s “Dune Messiah,” which is the book this film adapts.
The tank is real, it floats, and there is something moving behind the glass.”
Here is what is actually on screen, in order, because we pulled the thing frame by frame rather than reading somebody else’s summary of it. It opens in orbit, a cruciform Guild ship hanging over a blue and white world that is plainly not Arrakis. Then a dark interior, blue-lit, and a ribbed shape at the edge of frame that your eye reads as architecture until it moves. The camera pulls back and it is not architecture. It is a tank, maybe ten feet of it, suspended off the floor in an enormous chamber with three small figures standing underneath, and there is a single point of amber light near the top where a face should be. The last of the three shots is an extreme close-up on the shell, ribbed like a radiator, with a smeared orange glow behind frosted glass and one hard specular highlight. You do not get a clean look at the creature. You get the outline of one, and it is worse for it.
A word on why this is a bigger deal than a thirty-three-second advert deserves. Guild navigators are humans who have spent so long soaked in spice gas that they stop being humans, and the payoff is that they can see far enough ahead to steer a ship through folded space without killing everyone aboard. They are the reason interstellar travel works, which makes them the reason the Imperium works, which makes them a faction nobody can afford to ignore. David Lynch put one on screen in 1984 and it remains the single most-remembered image from that film, a bloated thing in a box exhaling orange fog. Villeneuve then made two movies and refused to give the audience the equivalent. Sitting on it for two films and finally cashing it in on a ticket promo is either a deeply confident piece of showmanship or the most expensive tease in the trilogy. Outlets have the character pegged as Edric, the navigator who joins the conspiracy against Paul in the novel, and that is almost certainly right, but Warner Bros. does not name him and neither will we.
From there the cutting gets fast. Chani (Zendaya) in close-up under a hood, stillsuit tube at her nose, eyes fully blue, looking down at something we are not shown. A silhouette walking away down a corridor lit gold, with the words “tickets on sale now” laid over it. A blurred tangle of cloth and sand that could be a fight or could be two people holding onto each other. Then Jason Momoa, masked to the eyes in black desert gear with a stave over his shoulder against a bleached white sky, which is the trilogy’s worst-kept secret finally standing up: Duncan Idaho died in the first film and comes back in this one, rebuilt by the Tleilaxu as a ghola called Hayt, and Momoa has been cheerfully spoiling it in interviews for over a year on the grounds that the book has been out since 1969.
Two shots in the middle stopped us dead. The first is a vast stone chamber, almost black, where two robed figures cross the floor carrying a lamp that throws the only light in the frame, and the scale of the doorway behind them is absurd. The second is a symmetrical composition across a still reflecting pool, a brutalist temple with a circular opening cut through the middle of it, and framed in that opening, growing in daylight, a green tree. There is no green on Arrakis worth photographing. Whatever that building is, and whoever the lone man sitting on its steps is, that shot is doing something the first two films never had the vocabulary for. There is also a quick close-up of a young man with a shaved head, blue-in-blue eyes and a dark mark painted under one of them, and we are not going to guess which of this cast that is.
Then the scale shots, and this is where the film starts showing you what an empire at war looks like. A landing field with ornithopters parked in rows and two lines of troops going down on one knee as a single figure walks the aisle between them, watched from a doorway by women in pale and grey robes. The IMAX card lands over a lone figure standing in front of a wall of dust the height of a building, with thumpers driven into the sand around him. A man screaming in a stillsuit with his goggles pushed up. A night battle under smoke and orange fire with red lasgun streaks coming down at an angle and a ship crossing low overhead, the words “and premium large format screenings” sitting over the top of it, which is a strange thing to read over people dying but here we are.
The last three images are the ones that will get argued about. Chani again, this time in full Fremen armor, walking straight at the camera out of a dust cloud, and she does not look like anyone’s love interest. A knife fight on open sand, crysknife raised over a shoulder mid-swing. And then a figure in heavy segmented armor with a spiked crest and two long antennae rising off the helmet, standing alone on a wet reflective plain at sunset with smoke on the horizon behind. Look past the armor at that horizon. There is a treeline. That fight is not happening on Arrakis, which is the whole point of “Dune Messiah,” a holy war that has already burned its way across the Imperium while its supposed messiah sits in a palace reading the casualty figures. And then the shot they saved for last, which is an aerial: a single caped figure standing on top of a stepped dais, arms out, with an army filling the frame to the horizon in every direction, Atreides hawk banners hanging down the sides and the crowd in the foreground with their arms up. It is Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) in the position the first two films spent five hours warning him about, and it lasts about a second before the gold title card. “Filmed for IMAX. Only in theaters. 12.18.26.”
The rest of the cast is the reason this thing is being sold like an event. Villeneuve directs from a screenplay he wrote with Brian K. Vaughan, and alongside Chalamet, Zendaya and Momoa there is Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan, Anya Taylor-Joy as Alia, Robert Pattinson as the Face Dancer Scytale, plus Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Charlotte Rampling and Isaach De Bankolé. If you have read the book you already know that Irulan, Scytale, a Reverend Mother and a Guild navigator are four corners of the same conspiracy, and that the teaser has now shown you at least two of them. That is not subtle. That is a studio telling book readers it did not chicken out.
Which brings us to the ugly commercial fact underneath all of this. The reason a thirty-three-second advert exists at all is that Warner Bros. is trying to lock in premium screens early, and the schedule is unusually aggressive: IMAX 70mm “Dune Insider” screenings on December 14, the rest of the IMAX network on December 15, other premium large format rooms on December 17, and the wide release on December 18, 2026. That last date is the problem. “Avengers: Doomsday” opens the same day. Two studios have parked their biggest film of the year on the same square and both of them want the same giant screens, which means somebody is going to lose rooms in week two. Fans have already started calling it Dunesday. Warner Bros. is not selling tickets in August because it is excited. It is selling them because in December there will not be enough projectors to go around.
What Do You Think? Was holding the Guild back for two entire films the right call, or did Villeneuve just spend his best card on a ticket advert? Is that treeline proof we are finally leaving Arrakis for the jihad, or a flashback we are all reading too much into? And when December 18 comes around and you have to choose one IMAX screen, does Paul Atreides or Doctor Doom get your money?
Catch up properly: every “Dune” film and series in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Dune timeline.
See you on the next binge!
