From Arrival to Blade Runner 2049 to both of his Dune movies, Denis Villeneuve clearly knows a thing or two about how to translate nuanced, high-concept sci-fi into artistic, crowd-pleasing films. In fact, if it weren’t for Deadpool & Wolverine, Villeneuve’s Dune: Par Two would be the number one money-making non-family film of the year. (Despicable Me 4 and Inside Out are slightly ahead of Dune 2 for the year.) The point is, despite the underwhelming performance of Blade Runner 2049 in 2017, and the shaky ground Dune: Part One stood on in 2021, Villeneuve has emerged as an artist who appears to make the kinds of movies he wants — movies that people want to see.
So, with the third Dune film, Dune Messiah, still very much in development limbo, what can we expect from Villeneuve’s other big science fiction project, the much-discussed adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama? The short answer is: don’t expect it to be anything like Dune. And, if Villeneuve is very smart, he and his collaborators will make Rama very different from its source material.
