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April 1, 2024 - 4:16pm
Dune Part 2 is even more successful than Dune Part 1. To date, it’s the highest grossing film of the year, raking in over $600 million in global box office receipts. Together, parts 1 and 2 have grossed more than a billion dollars.
Dune Part 3, based on Frank Herbert’s follow-up novel, Dune Messiah, is now on the cards. However, it’s unlikely there’ll be further adaptations. The next novel (spoilers ahead) in the sequence involves a giant man-worm ruling the galaxy for 3,000 years. Not even a genius director like Denis Villeneuve could turn that into a viable movie.
Luckily for Hollywood, there are plenty of other densely plotted sci-fi novels ready to be adapted. The Dune films prove that the audience is out there. So does the adaptation of Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem, currently on Netflix. Scenes of subtitled Chinese dialogue have not put off western viewers — nor has all the talk of particle physics.
Clearly, serious science fiction is having a moment. After decades of being overshadowed by superhero stories, fantasy and horror, the smartest of the genres is back. Audiences have grown bored with caped crusaders, wizards and vampires — and want something extra-terrestrial, yet plausible, instead.
That’s why the sci-fi revival is being led by the “hard” end of the genre. “Soft” SF doesn’t dwell upon how its fictional worlds work — it gets straight to the spectacle, action and human interest.
For hard SF fans, it’s gratifying to see niche obsessions entering mainstream culture, but why now? The new possibilities offered by CGI and streaming clearly play a part, but there’s something more important going on.
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SubscribeLoved reading Dune as a kid and watching the movies as an adult. One of my favourite sci-fi series’ is Mortal Engines. The books were fantastic. They even produced a movie for the first book, which I thought was well done. Must have bombed at the box office because they never made another.
Yeah, unfortunately the Mortal Engines movie bombed hard. It is a shame since they did a great job on the look of it, but whatever that intangible thing is that makes a hit, it didn’t have it.
The book series was fantastic.
The writer makes an important connection between real-world events and the types of fiction which gain traction. I think this deserves a wider airing.
It can only be hoped so. With the exception of Iain M Banks the most modern Sci-Fi books that I have are by William Gibson. It’s hard to imagine any resurgence coming close to the 1950’s and ’60’s, and/or the giants like Philip K d**k, Asimov, Bradbury or Clarke
Speaking of Iain Banks, I would think the culture series would do well in the current climate.
I stopped reading once I encountered “ Not even a genius director like Denis Villeneuve…”. Clearly the author has no taste whatsoever.
very wise
It still confuses me that nobody has done a TV or movie adaptation of A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Is Unherd embracing nerd culture?
Although there is a market for hard science fiction, I’m not convinced yet. My favourite series in recent years was The Expanse, adapted from the novels of James Corey, and although fairly popular among fans of a harder science fiction, it didn’t really trigger anything.
I think the author does make some interesting points about the nature of our times, but I think there are simpler explanations for the movie’s success. Dune is possibly the preeminent science fiction novel, so will always garner interest. The 80s movie had a terrible choice for director (no slight on David Lynch, who I think is fantastic) and the later sci-fi channel adaptation was just very low budget and looked more like Babylon 5. We’ve just had a high quality adaptation of an extremely successful and well regarded novel – Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings was a similar event and that didn’t herald anything about the contemporary period it was filmed and released.
Huge fan of the Expanse novels, but I honestly was a little disappointed in the show. I understand why they didn’t, but I wish they would have gotten older actors and finished the story through book 9.
A rarity for me, but I watched the show before reading the books. It’s usually safer that way.
First three seasons of the Expanse show are some of the best sci-fi television out there. I enjoyed the books other than the fourth one, but I think the show took the amazing world building of the books and added much needed character development. The show dropped off significantly after S3 and I still haven’t finished the whole series.
I watched the first three seasons of the Expanse before I read the books. I think Seasons 4 and 5 maintained the quality of the first three, but Season 6 was shortened and was a disappointment. Book 4 and Season 4, “Cibola Burn” where humans start their first colony on an exoplanet, was my favorite. The colony was a near complete disaster until James Holden and the crew of the Roci turned it around. I was disappointed in the final three books which replaced the complexities of Earth-Mars-Belter “geopolitics” with a simplistic conquest of all of human space by a proto molecule enhanced Napoleon wanna-be.
Awful film. Pointless and pretentious acting. The soundtrack is actually just sound – not music.
Dune Part 2 didn’t do it for me, I’m afraid.