8 Sci-Fi Movie Remakes You Didn't Know Were In The Works

6. Dune

dune lynch
Lynch/Universal Pictures

1984's Dune, directed by David Lynch, is one of the weirdest, most haphazard sci-fi experiences you'll ever have.

The late great Roger Ebert summed it up best in his review: "This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time".

To be fair to Lynch, the Dune novel can't have been easy to adapt. It covers everything from upper-class politics to space travel to metaphysics, and cramming everything into one film must have been tough.

So, when news came earlier this year that Legendary Pictures had signed Denis Villeneuve to direct the "Dune series film project", there were audible sighs of relief around the globe.

Starting a franchise with a talent like Villeneuve at the helm is the right move to take with a novel this complex; one film simply may not be enough.

The Dune novel and its many sequels created a massive, sprawling world that's perfect for the cinematic universe treatment.

It's unknown if the remake will be based solely on that first novel, but with so much material to mine, building Dune as a series rather than a one-shot should allow each film in the prospective franchise room to breathe.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!