Denis Villeneuve looks to be learning from Blade Runner 2049's failure by making Dune more accessible to a general audience. Up until now, Dune's trailers have only had moderate success in generating excitement for the film outside the book's fans. But the newest trailer showed a change in marketing direction as the action set pieces and moments of comedy are on full display. It serves as a stark contrast to Villeneuve's previous film, Blade Runner 2049, which kept its story and action heavily under wraps in the marketing.
Warner Bros. hit a box office failure with Blade Runner 2049. The sequel to the sci-fi cult classic struggled to gain a wide audience its opening weekend due to its R-rating and mysterious trailers. Despite a high critic rating, it wasn't enough to save the film. Dune, which adapts Frank Herbert's groundbreaking books, mirrors the Blade Runner franchise, also being the next adaptation of a 1980s cult classic and releasing in October. Learning from its mistakes, however, Warner Bros. is getting the jump on marketing by revealing more to save the film from being another Blade Runner 2049.
Moviegoers will immediately notice the humor and action spectacle that waits for them in the Dune trailer. Initially, some audiences were concerned with Dune's controversial first images released as they presented a dark and somber tone. But people can tuck away those concerns as Villeneuve looks to be bringing a fun and complex sci-fi adventure to the screen, judging from the most recent trailer. Moments like Duke Leto asking Gurney to smile or Duncan Idaho telling Paul he lacks muscle may be few, but it hardly steers into the dark and serious world of Blade Runner. Likewise, while Blade Runner 2049 is widely regarded as one of the best sci-fi films made, its lack of action and slow pace hurt it at the box office with general audiences. Dune looks to expunge those concerns by putting the action front and center. The trailer already teased large-scale battles between the two rival clans, House Atreides and the Harkonnens.
Also, while it could have been something easy to hide, the trailers haven’t been afraid to show off Dune's iconic sandworms. Already, it teases some of the big set pieces from the book where the main characters come in contact with these ship-swallowing beasts. Dune's iconography is synonymous with the sandworms, and not showing them would've been a mistake. Revealing them up front allows the movie to avoid mystery box marketing that can hurt a movie's reception if there's not enough to engage audiences not already familiar with the source material. Blade Runner 2049 wasn't afforded that luxury in the hopes of preserving the secrecy around its characters and their roles in the story, and in the end, the overly enigmatic marketing hurt it at the box office.
Villeneuve made a smart decision to only adapt the first half of the book. While Dune is still a major box office risk, audiences not familiar with the books won't be overwhelmed with the amount of information tossed at them. The film can go at its own pace without being overly long or cramming in plot details in order to fit the whole story. With Dune reported to be two hours and 35 minutes long, Villeneuve is setting a reasonable runtime for audiences that may have been scared off by his previous film's two hours and 43 minutes. It's only an eight-minute difference, but for some moviegoers, anything closer to that three-hour mark can be off-putting, and Villeneuve doesn’t look to be making that mistake again.
The team behind Dune is ramping up its marketing to avoid the mistakes it made with Blade Runner 2049. Villeneuve is shaping up his latest film to be more for a general audience while still redefining the sci-fi movie genre. In hopes of a sequel, Dune is tossing its net wide to capture as large of an audience as it can opening weekend.
