Dune: 5 Reasons It Will Be A Massive Hit (And 5 Reasons It Will Flop)

There's no way around it: Dune is a deeply odd book even by the standards of sci-fi. Building-sized sandworms that produce a spice called Melange that can give anyone who ingests it limited psychic abilities, a group of space witches that can use their voices to control people's minds, a race of desert dwellers that drink their recycled perspiration, none of these things are what you would typically imagine as the stuff of crowd-pleasing sci-fi epics.

While the worldbuilding in the book is so expertly handled that you come to accept the alien nature of Arrakis and all of its idiosyncrasies, not everything that works on the page will necessarily work on the screen. Imagining someone riding a giant worm through the desert is a lot different than seeing it.

The novel also has a lot of unsettling developments, especially those involving the dastardly villain Vladimir Harkonnen and Paul's younger sister Alia. It will take a very precise control of tone to present these characters in a way that does not turn off audiences, especially Vladimir Harkonnen.

David Lynch being David Lynch leaned into the grosser and more off-putting aspects of the character in his adaptation, which is in line with the novel; however, Lynch went so over-the-top that much of Vladimir's menace became lost in translation. Judging from the trailers, Villeneuve is trying to give things a more grounded feeling, but audiences may still not be ready to go on a journey that's this out there.