Dune movie gets a stunning fan made poster highlighting the main cast. David Lynch first brought Frank Herbert’s famed sci-novel to the screen in 1984, but the movie was destined to be a critical and commercial flop and Lynch would later disown it, saying it was not the film he wanted to make.
Decades after Lynch’s still-painful failure, filmmaker Denis Villeneuve will take his own stab at adapting Herbert’s novel for the screen (without Dino de Laurentiis getting in the way). Of course, Villeneuve is still up against many of the obstacles that faced Lynch, including the sheer hugeness of Herbert’s world, but he also has many advantages. For one, Villeneuve gets to spread the first Dune novel across two movies, a luxury Lynch did not have. Also, Villeneuve gets to take advantage of modern-day computer effects as he attempts to visualize the exotic environments, strange technologies and mythic creatures Herbert created for the page.
With Villeneuve’s take on Dune still set to release later this year (even in the face of the industry-wide chaos created by the coronavirus pandemic), the first images from the movie have hit the internet, giving fans a glimpse of Timothee Chalamet, Josh Brolin, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac and other cast members as they will appear in the film. Now, artist Haley Turnbull has taken a few of those images and used them to put together a stunning Dune poster. See the art in the space below:
As Turnbull explained on Reddit, the poster’s tagline is actually adapted from the one used on poster art for the 1984 Dune movie, whose full tagline read “A world beyond your experience, beyond your imagination. A place beyond your dreams. A movie beyond your imagination.” Indeed, that unwieldy tagline gives some glimpse into how difficult it was for de Laurentiis and Universal to figure out exactly how to sell the movie to an audience mostly unfamiliar with Herbert’s novel (and that difficulty helps explain why the movie was such a flop).
Hopefully, Villeneuve and company will have an easier time encapsulating Dune for the purposes of marketing. In fact, solid, straight-forward art work like the poster featured above might not be a bad way to go in selling the movie. Of course, there have already been some complaints that the character images seen so far make the movie look too much like Star Wars. Escaping comparisons to Star Wars will no doubt be difficult for Dune, even though in truth the universe presented in Herbert’s novel is far richer and more interesting than George Lucas’ galaxy far, far away. It remains to be seen if the virtues of Dune can be conveyed to potential audiences, or if the movie is doomed to the same fate as the 1984 film, which inspired much more head scratching than admiration.
Source: Haley Turnbull/Reddit
